Fairphone3 Liberation

In the beginning of November last year I received the successor of the Fairphone2, but as explained in the post I wrote, I was a little hesitate to start using it because there was no Google free operating system available at that time.

But things have changed recently. My bet was on LineageOS, but it turns out there is another interesting project, which suits my needs even better. The project is called /e/. From the project website:

Your data is YOUR data!
We build desirable, open source,
privacy-enabled smartphone operating systems.
We are /e/

Two weeks ago Fairphone and /e/ announced a partnership, so it became a serious alternative to the pre loaded Android Pie version. The release of the second install image made me jump aboard.

Yesterday evening I walked through the installation guide for the FP3 and got stuck on the first fastboot command:

$ fastboot -w‌
‌wiping userdata...‌
‌Invalid erase-block-size 512: must be a power of 2 and at least 4096.‌
‌Invalid logical-block-size 512: must be a power of 2 and at least 4096.‌
‌mke2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)‌
‌/tmp/TemporaryFile-dYayla: Unimplemented ext2 library function while setting up superblock‌
‌/usr/lib/android-sdk/platform-tools/mke2fs failed with status 1‌
‌mke2fs failed: 1‌
‌error: Cannot generate image for userdata‌

It took some time to figure it out. The mke2fs utility was too old. This version comes with Ubuntu 18.04. After I downloaded and used the recommended platform-tools package which included a newer mke2fs it worked as expected:

$ fastboot -w
Erasing 'userdata'                                 OKAY [  0.165s]
mke2fs 1.45.4 (23-Sep-2019)
Creating filesystem with 12777209 4k blocks and 3194880 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 023ea08b-9dac-4500-8b34-c2baf2078aad
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
	4096000, 7962624, 11239424

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (65536 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done   

Sending 'userdata' (316 KB)                        OKAY [  0.040s]
Writing 'userdata'                                 OKAY [  0.028s]
Finished. Total time: 0.423s

After the last command the phone reboots into /e/:

$ fastboot flashing lock
                                                   OKAY [  0.076s]
Finished. Total time: 0.076s

The complete installation guide can be found over here: https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP3/install

At last. Liberation is there!