Laissez-moi vous raconter un atelier que nous avons mené à ESA le75.
Un smartphone représente le sommet de toute une série de technologies, conçues par des milliers de personnes extrêmement malines. C’est le summum de ce que l’industrie de masse peut produire. Il contient de millions de transistors fabriqués à une échelle microscopique. Des métaux rares en plus, pour lesquels, nous dirait habitus, on a violenté la terre un peu partout. Il contient un cerveau numérique véloce, un écran tactile et une dizaine de senseurs.
Dans des fonds de tiroir autour du monde se cache un immense tas de smartphones obsolètes. Cet obsolescence est souvent d'ordre logiciel : car leurs systèmes d’exploitation ne reçoivent plus de mises à jour et il n’est donc plus possible d’utiliser des applications récentes. Pourtant, le materiel même continue de fonctionner.
Même les plus bricoleur·euses, les hobbyistes et les artistes numériques, préfèrent en général utiliser des mini-ordinateurs tels que le Raspberry Pi ou des cartes comme l’Arduino. Celle-là a aussi des raisons logicielles: ces objets sont moins vérouillés et permettent plus facilement d’installer son propre code dessus. Pourtant, acheter un Raspberry et lui adjoindre des sorties et des entrées, comparables à ceux d’un GSM, est très coûteux : financièrement, mais aussi sur le plan environnemental, car des ressources vierges et non renouvelables sont employées.
C’est pour ça que je suis tant attiré par l’idée de faire des transplantations de cerveaux des anciens smartphones. Installer un système d’exploitation récent et libre sur des smartphones me semble le premier pas pour les utiliser comme composants dans de nouveaux projets. C’est tout le promesse du projet PostMarketOs, né en réponse à l’obsolescence programmée des smartphones. Les producteurs de smartphone sous Android travaillent avec un noyau Linux libre, et pourraient potentiellement profiter des mise-à-jours de ce projet au fil des années. Mais iels choisissent systématiquement de créer, pour chaque modèle de téléphone, leur propre branche du Linux, d’y ajouter des modifications, et de perdre ensuite les mise-à-jours du noyau. PostMarketOS choisit la démarche inverse en contribuant au code du noyau Linux, qui permet ensuite de le faire tourner sans modifications sur l’appareil. Il devient ainsi possible de faire tourner un Linux récent sur un portable ancien, sans la couche Android obsolète du producteur.. Plus contraints d’être un téléphone, ces objets redeviennent ce qu’ils ont toujours été : de petits ordinateurs bourrés de technologie capables d'interagir avec le monde autour.
Ces ordinateurs peuvent se convertir en cerveaux d’une installation artistique, en collectant des données en ligne ou en les transférant, en pilotant d’autres appareils via leur port USB, et en permettant l’interaction via l’écran tactile. Esthétiquement, ces téléphones anciens témoignent également de leur époque, et arrivent ainsi à ajouter une couche à la langue technologique, qui a tendance à projeter une certaine idée lissée et atemporelle du futur.
These are the phones that were listed on PostmarketOS’ devices page, at the time of the workshop. It might seem like a somewhat arbitrary collection, but the underlying principle is support for the phones chipset in the Linux project. For example the OnePlus 6, Oneplus 6T, Samsung Galaxy S9 and Xiaomi POCO F1 all use the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset.
For the workshop we also brought some phones of our own. We brought a OnePlus 6, a Pine64 Pinephone, and a collection of 5 Samsung Galaxy S III. The Samsung, because since each phone has its own caveats, I figured to focus on one device so we could get to know its quirks. We settled on the Samsung Galaxy S III. More than 80 million were sold, so even despite being fourteen years old, there all still plenty available. It means that we can get hold enough of them to equip everybody in a workshop. Its age also makes i a good fit: for some of the more recent phones supported by PostMarketOs, you could potentially still use them as a smartphone. The S III is too old to run modern phone software, so we can use it as a platform for expirementation instead. And finally, it has a decent DAC, the part that makes analog sound come out of the mini–jack. Which means it has potential to function as a music source or even an instrument.
by bnf - June 28, 2026 10:29 PM
I was there, here’s my pictures ! The workshop of one afternoon was of course short. We took inventory of the large amount of in- and outputs a phone provides. We shared a discussion about sustainability of the electronic objects in our live. When it came to to experimenting with the phones, we focused on the first step: the brain transplant. We tried the software Heimdall which is designed to flash custom firmwares to the Samsung Galaxy family of devices. We downloaded images from the PostMarketOs website.
There’s something particular about Linux, and that is you always get to choose. As opposed to Mac or Windows where Apple or Microsoft choose all the parts of your operating system, in Linux you get to select all the moving parts yourself. And PostmarketOs is no exception. The most obvious one is that you have to select which Graphical User Interface you want to use. The most phone like are Phosh (based on Gnome) and Plasma (based on KDE).
We tried both Phosh and Plasma and while they both worked Phosh seemed a bit more stable. It could be that it is a bit lighter on resources. Having tried Phosh since, it seems like it has gotten heavier and the same Samsung device is struggling more. So if you use one of these Phone-like environments, be ready to find ways to trim and slim them down.
For this generation of Samsung phones it is relatively easy to install another OS. You boot it in recovery mode. you connect to your computer with a USB cable and you can use a software called heimdall to flash the alternative OS.
On the left, a Samsung Galaxy S III after a factory reset, ready to install its original Android 4 Operating System. On the right, that same phone with postmarketOS installed instead.
The most annoying part is that the transfers sometimes fail. I’ve since learned that it depends a lot on the cable, the shorter the cable the better.
Mac and Linux worked fine (I installed heimdall through Homebrew on Mac). Once you get to modifying postmarketOS, Linux becomes indespensable: after all it’s all about repurposing the Linux ecosystem.
Alex managed to talk to the Oneplus 6 over SSH, and tell it to shut down remotely.
by tellyou - September 6, 2026 8:03 PM
Voilà une petite liste de toutes les capteurs:
Et les sorties:
by bnf - September 7, 2026 7:27 PM
To be honest, one of the things we realised quickly is that while we got the phones to boot with alternative operating systems, view of the peripherals seemed to work with it. The camera didn’t work. The speakers did: the mini-jack didn’t. Wifi did, and there was a terminal.
by tellyou - September 7, 2026 8:18 PM
I couldn’t find so many examples of postmarketOS projects. I don’t think we’re alone in seeing the potential. After having it boot, it just seems like it is a lot of work to really exploit all the capacities of the device. Out of the box it’s mostly the screen that works.
One use case I’ve seen several times, is running a small server on a phone. But you could say that’s something any Raspberry Pi-like device will already do for you. It doesn’t require any of the sensors or even a screen—most servers get accessed over the terminal. Although with the phone, you do get built-in protection against power cuts. And the phone is charged / powered directly by DC so you can connect one of these small solar panels people use when hiking or going to festivals.
by baseline - September 15, 2026 4:47 PM
Yeah I feel like this could mitigate some of the ecological collatoral of the ‘maker’ subculture, the whole tinkering with Raspberry pi field. Because you get a Raspberry pi but it doesn’t do much. You add a screen, you add a sensor. And all this is aimed at hobbyists and because of the smaller volumes you’re dealing with components so much more shitty than what you could find one a phone: 800 by 480 screens, or very tiny screens, or some of these double line 2 times 20 character LED displays that were the bane of my existence when programming early 1990ies digital synthesizers. And all of this bought new, from AliExpress. Until recently it was extremely cheap to have things sent over B2C from China, so European tinkerers were incentivised to buy new parts from across the globe rather than scavenge from what was available.
It’s a big challenge of electronics as a hobby, or practice, everything is made very far away, the supply chains are long, brittle and opaque. I can start woodworking with beech wood from the forest 10 km away and I can cook with the vegetables grown 5km the other way. So if I could do electronics with what I find in my own drawer that would make me happy.
by habitus - September 15, 2026 5:26 PM