After months of working hard to bring Replicant to the next upstream release, we are proud to announce the release of the Replicant 4.0 0001 images. This new release comes with support for both new devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus or the Galaxy S2 and devices that were already there in Replicant 2.3, like the Nexus S and the Galaxy S.
Aside from the new Ice Cream Sandwich user experience, that we tried to make as good as possible without any non-free blob, most devices have better hardware support than before, such as Galaxy S which now has working camera, or the global improvements that were made to make telephony more stable and reliable. Even though it’s not perfect yet, we are proud of the result, that many of us use daily. If you encounter a particular problem with our software, do not hesitate to report the issue via our tracker, or give feedback when a problem was resolved.
We are indeed writing hundreds of lines of code to have more hardware supported and with a better state, replacing non-free components, step by step. Keep in mind that Replicant has a very small core team, we’re just two people doing this on our free time: that means we can’t work on every side of the project at the same time and have to make choices. This is why we will always welcome serious new contributors who’d like to get involved in the project.
You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.
Wow! Awesome! Thanks so much Replicant team, you’re amazing.
Time to buy a Galaxy Nexus
My freedom is ready.
You are fucking great guys !
Thanks you for this awesome stuff
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No samsung galaxy s3 support yet?
I would like to help somehow.
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This release announcement made my day today. Thank you very much. You do a wonderful job.
What about Replicant 4 for GTA04? Anyone working on it?
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No support yet, because we don’t have the device (yet). We will start a donation program in some time, mainly to help us buy new devices, like the Galaxy S3 !
Since flash is going to be replaced by html5, the developer should concentrate on this project. Tell phoronix.com about it for a news.
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We’re not dropping the effort to support the GTA04, I’ll get back to it soon and will most likely start by porting to 4.0. The problem, as usual, is that we lack manpower and need to support multiple devices at the same time.
I wish it was that easy ! Unfortunately, flash is still widely present on the web. Aside from HTML5, there are also some projects aiming to extract the content flash provides, such as libquvi.
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Hi, thank you very much for creating a 100% free-software alternative for our phones. You are great, guys
I’d like to contribute, but I definitely have to time for now. Perhaps in the future I will contribute.
I have read in the web that some phone hardware is evil: That means that the software (even free software) can’t control the hardware totally, so the hardware could be remotelly controlled by the telephony operator (even with Replicant!). Does any of the supported phones have evil hardware? I would like to buy a non-evil phone and install non-evil software on it (such as Replicant).
Thank you guys again
This totally depends on the hardware design : some hardware is designed to give the CPU all powers over the other chips and some give these powers to the modem too. For instance on MSM/QSD platforms, the modem (which runs non-free software) can read/write NAND (memory), controls the GPS, the Audio subsystem and can access the RAM as well. The supported phones with these issues are the HTC Dream and Nexus One. Samsung phones are better, since on Nexus S and Galaxy S, only a small amount of RAM is shared with the modem (and the modem doesn’t control the GPS, Audio or NAND), and on Galaxy Nexus, no RAM is shared. So Galaxy Nexus is a good target for that. There is also the Goldelico GTA04 with a very good hardware design : the modem has no control over NAND, RAM, Audio, GPS, so it’s a safe platform. Support for the GTA04 will come eventually (though we already did an incomplete 2.3 release).
Very good explanation, PaulK, thank you.
So in few words, we can sort the phones supported by Replicant in the following way: (from best to most evil)
- Goldelico GTA04 (very good)
- Galaxy Nexus (good)
- Nexus S (a bit evil)
- Galaxy S (a bit evil)
- HTC Dream (very evil)
- Nexus One (very evil)
I will consider Goldelico GTA04 and Galaxy Nexus when looking for a new phone (next months). Before buying one of them, I will wait for Goldelico GTA04 to be well supported in Replicant.
Thank you
Great job, thanks.
Long life to replicant.