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Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro (samsung-j7y17lte)

From postmarketOS Wiki
Revision as of 08:40, 24 October 2023 by Buildingat90degreesC (talk | contribs) (Placed up a warning. Reason: Restarting while TWRP is in a middle of proccessing script files will result in no changes made to the system.)
Warning WARNING: This port uses proprietary vendor firmware blobs (H-VENDOR.zip). If you wish to not use these, you are free to do so, at the cost of reducing the device functionality.
Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro
J7 Pro running on XFCE4 desktop environment.
J7 Pro running on XFCE4 desktop environment.
Manufacturer Samsung
Name Galaxy J7 Pro
Codename samsung-j7y17lte
Released 2017
Type handset
Hardware
Chipset Samsung Exynos 7870 Octa
CPU Octa-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A53
GPU Mali-T830 MP1
Display 1080 x 1920 Super AMOLED
Storage 16/32/64 GB
Memory 3 GB
Architecture aarch64
Software
Original software Android
Original version 7.0
Extended version 9.0
postmarketOS
Category testing
Pre-built images no
Mainline no
Features
Flashing
Partial
USB Networking
Works
Internal storage
No data
SD card
No data
Battery
Works
Screen
Works
Touchscreen
Works
Multimedia
3D Acceleration
Broken
Audio
Broken
Camera
Broken
Camera Flash
No data
Connectivity
WiFi
Works
Bluetooth
Broken
GPS
Broken
NFC
Broken
Modem
Calls
No data
SMS
No data
Mobile data
Broken
Miscellaneous
FDE
No data
USB OTG
Works
Sensors
Accelerometer
No data
Proximity
No data
Haptics
No data


Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro, also known Samsung Galaxy J7 2017, is an Exynos 7870 device released by Samsung in 2016.

Contributors

  • Buildingat90degreesC (Porting postmarketOS)

Users owning this device


How to enter flash mode

When the phone is powered off, hold the Power, Home and Volume Down buttons to boot into download mode. A turquoise colored screen will appear, asking for confirmation. Press Volume Up to confirm. Your device is ready for flashing via a front-end such as Odin or Heimdall.

To boot into recovery, hold the Power, Home and Volume Down buttons.


Notice Download mode performs some checks with the provided images before flashing it for partitions except BOOT. The images generated by pmbootstrap do not pass those checks, and thus it isn't possible to flash the rootfs using download mode.

Installation

Prerequisites

Make sure your phone:

  • Has its bootloader unlocked.
  • Has a custom recovery installed (such as TWRP)
  • Created the Vendor partition and flashed H-Vendor zip before

Preparation

Download the repartition script here for creating Vendor partition: https://xdaforums.com/t/tool-7870-universal-repartition-script-for-vendor-support.4143541/

Flash the zip file. It will automatically reboot to recovery.

Now in recovery again, Go to Advanced Wipe, wipe system, cache and vendor and format data. (If you can't format any of those partitions tap on the Cache partition only, for example, and go to Repair or Change File System > Change File System > EXT2 and then swap to change and then go back to Advanced Wipe, Repair or Change File System > Change File System > and then this time EXT4 and swap to change again. Repeat this step to any partition you haven't been able to format.)

Download the H-Vendor here: https://xdaforums.com/t/treble-10-0-arm64-h-vendor-v1-0.4116271/

This one is important. Flash the zip BEFORE flashing the postmarketOS zip file on TWRP

Choose the following in the pmbootstrap init wizard:

Vendor: samsung
Device codename: j7y17lte
User interface: xfce4

xfce4 is tested and works out of the box. Other UIs are not guaranteed to work.

gnome-mobile comes with wayland as its dependency. Since wayland doesn't run in downstream kernels, xorg needs to be installed.

Extra packages: xorg-server

To proceed with the installation run:

$ pmbootstrap install --android-recovery-zip

After the installation process is completed, get your phone booted into recovery, and enable sideloading via adb. Then run:

$ pmbootstrap flasher --method=adb sideload

Or you can export the zip file and install it directly via TWRP.

$ pmbootstrap export

Then nagivate to /tmp/postmarketOS/ You'll see the recovery zip there. But you need to right click it and open the real location of it because it is just a link.

Transfer the zip file to your phone.

This will begin installing pmbootstrap prepare a recovery zip file. By default, the rootfs is flashed in the SYSTEM partition of the device.

In order to change the default partition (let's say, the USERDATA partition), append --recovery-install-partition=USERDATA to the above command.

The recovery zip gets flashed to your device. Reboot to system when it's done.

Warning WARNING: Do not reboot to system until the TWRP is done processing script files and there's no output coming like "Setting tw_app_prompt to 0". If you do then the the recovery will not write the changes made.


Notes on WiFi

For now the device doesn't connect to the WiFi via Network Manager. You'll need to use wpa_supplicant.

Refer to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/WiFi#Using_wpa_supplicant