/e/OS workshop and install party in Argentina

[soldan]

Hello!

First of all, this text was written with deepl, sorry if there are mistakes.

I’m soldan, active member of the argentinian hacktivist group called “cybercirujas”. We are a group that militates the free software from concrete actions in the territory. We repair computers and recycle them with free software, in addition to generating debates around issues of what we call “technopolitics”: right to privacy, right to repair, criticism of the data oligarchs and other related issues. We are a very active group in Argentina, with great deployment throughout the territory, reaching the mass media both in Argentina and neighboring countries (we have even been interviewed by the Spanish newspaper “El país”).

In the last months we started to spread, divulge and raise awareness about android cell phones and how to extend their life. We have given some online talks, written some texts and due to the growing interest, we are going to give a workshop about android phones life extension.

We are going to give two workshops. This 11/23 in the city of Posadas, province of Misiones, and on 12/11 in the city of Buenos Aires. In this workshop we will teach the basics of an android phone and we will explain how to unlock our phones, recommending the use of /e/OS. In this sense, we will explain how to install /e/OS in android and we will talk about why we recommend that free android in our phones.

I wanted to tell you about this activity because I think you might find it interesting. From our militant space we understand that it is extremely important to raise awareness about our mobile phones, not only for privacy issues, but also for the fact of giving survival to the phones, which are the most disposable computer objects in the world. In Argentina it is also very expensive to access a new phone, often the cheapest phones are of poor quality and it is more convenient to buy a used phone in good condition with support for /e/OS or other free rom. For example, I use as my main phone a Moto G7 Power with /e/OS and I am completely satisfied with the performance.
For this Saturday’s workshop, I have 7 people signed up who will bring phones to modify, plus I will bring some old phones that can run different versions of /e/OS and I will provide netbooks with which to install the system. For the workshop in Buenos Aires city we have 15 registered.
I will keep you posted on how it goes.

Greetings and thanks for the work you do.

[soldan]

this was written with deepl sorry for the errors

I wanted to tell you about this first “Install Party”.

The city of Posadas is the capital of the province of Misiones, which is about 1100 kilometers away from the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. I lived in Buenos Aires from 2012 to 2022 and there I was developing the Cybercirujas community, and now I try to replicate it in Misiones (we have cybercirujas community in other provinces of Argentina).

The workshop was attended by 5 people, 3 of which had no knowledge of customs roms or alternative software and lasted about two and a half hours. I brought 3 netbooks with Linux and 3 phones to install /e/OS: a Moto G 4G (peregrine), Moto G2 codename Titan and Redmi Note 7 codename lavender. The G2 has no /e/Os rom so we installed lineage.

But before all this, we explained how an Android works, the bootloader, recovery and how to know the specifications of a phone and search for ROMs in XDA/Lineage/e-os. I didn’t stop on how to unlock the bootloader and install recoveries because there was little time and it was rather introductory, but I did show how to install ROMs on an android and we stopped to install /e/OS on the Redmi note 7 and Moto G peregrine.

There was a couple who are cell phone technicians, but at the hardware level. One of them was fascinated with how smoothly /e/OS ran on the Moto G peregrine. They had recently bought a new phone because theirs was running very slow, and this Moto G, which is from 2014, ran smoother than their previous phone. I also showed them how to use alternative open source stores to test other applications, since they had no phones available to modify.

All in all, it was an excellent start. They were very happy and surprised by all the information, which they were completely unaware of. The couple of technicians agreed to check what old phones they have stored, for a next meeting, to do a complete installation, unlocking bootloader, installing recovery and then switching to /e/OS or Lineage depending on the model.

I didn’t take many pictures but I upload the few I have.