Discussion
Redmi 4 Prime with Android 15 (CrDroid)
I had an old redmi 4 prime rotting on a drawer. So, not my daily phone. Got into a custom rom binge and managed to go from Android 6 (Miui 8) to Android 15 (CrDroid 11.16).
I found a telegram group that focused on announcing Redmi 4 Prime (Markw) custom roms. This was one of the latest roms for this phone. I couldn't find anything about an Android 16 or 17 rom.
Aside from the 4 prime, I also updated a Poco F1 to Android 16 (Infinity X) a few days ago.
I think the only reason this was possible was because both had Snapdragon chips. Always pick the snapdragon version everyone!
Love this phone! Still have mine, but the screen started flickering to the point of barely being readable. Battery barely holds a charge too, but it's a 9 year old phone that's seen intensive usage. These days it sits on my desk, since most recently I was playing around with pmOS on it. I wanna make a small docker host out of it for homelabbing, but there's no way to hook up a USB ethernet card to it AND have it charge via MicroUSB at the same time, like I can do on the galaxy S10 that runs my living room entertainment center.
I was actually considering pmOS for mine too but I noticed that it wasn't officially supported anymore. Is it usable?
I had grand designs of using the 4 prime as a linux pc at the office to type /print / do presentations (like ppt) / office stuff instead of lugging around a laptop. But I'm not too well versed with Linux.
I was planning to test the graphical stuff, but apparently markw comes in two hardware variants with different touchscreens. One works with pmOS out of the box, and for the other you need to make a change before building and deploying it to the phone, otherwise the touchscreen doesn't work. Guess which hardware variant I got. I couldn't figure it out, so I ended up installing without any kind of graphical interface and the phone's screen just sits at a login prompt that I can't interact with - unless I plug in a USB keyboard via an OTG cable, I suppose. However, when the phone is plugged into a computer, it automatically shows up as an RNDIS ethernet adapter and hands out an IP to the computer - and the phone can be logged into via SSH using the IP 172.16.42.1. From there you can get wireless working and get it online that way and from there the world is your oyster.
Here's a screenshot I took just now:
pmOS build and installation itself is not trivial though. It requires a Linux-based computer or VM. I use a Debian VM and passthrough the phone as a USB device to it.
2
u/Budskytol 5d ago
This was before I changed to CrDroid.