Samsung Galaxy Note 4 SM-N910W8 (Snapdragon)

@itsclarence Had a few random restarts. The phone may have been doing this with the official ROM. It being a factory refurbish, it may have had a hardware issue? As it was sold on eBay by a 3rd party in China, I am uncertain if it was tampered with.

Holding the phone near my chest then quickly (but gently/non-jarring) pull it away, was causing an instant reboot. Then after pushing something on the notification menu to drag it down (intending to edit), it got stuck in a reboot loop, about 3 seconds after logo appeared, it would reboot. I removed the cover and removed the battery, reinserted, and powered up, everything was stable again.

With cover still off, I tried pushing the battery around and was not able to cause a reboot, so I think the battery fitment is good. Not sure if there’s some loose connector internally, some damaged chip/circuit, a hardware tamper, a software tamper, or an /e/ bug? Perhaps any combination. Not ideal for testing.

The other phone with stock ROM also does the random rebooting thing, though not as often, and it has never gone into a loop and not had the position reboot.

Anyways, there are maybe 6-8 settings related to automatic adjustment of brightness based upon ambient light settings. None of them seem to work. I must always manually adjust brightness, even in pitch black darkness at night, which is annoying. The Reading Mode (turns colors greyscale, extra darkness at night) is forgotten after reboot.

Day/Night Light/Dark theme doesn’t automatically switch. Not sure if I misunderstand the settings.
The excessive amount of similarly named settings is confusing. There are some settings pages which do not respect the dark theme, and present a bright white background menu. There are also several items, like notification icons and menu items, which do not respect the dark theme, and keep black text with a dark background.

A usability issue, organizing the “Home” panel and the one to the left. Samsung Note 3 & 4 had this ability to edit and delete all panels, add or remove entire panels, create empty panels, add and remove any or all widgets. With /e/, the panel to the left has static items that can’t be removed. “Search”, a Weather widget, and I think something else? I want it all removed. Is it possible? Is it possible to create new empty panels? I know I can drag one icon to the right to create a panel, but it is cumbersome to drag the icons. The screen acts fidgety, and the selection and dragging seems to respond a bit erratically.

There was this other issue, when I changed a setting (I forgot the setting, maybe related to brightness?), it dramatically decreased sensitivity to the screen, and made it very difficult to tap on any icon or menu. I had to disable that setting. I will have to try and find that setting again and reproduce.

Some of these things may be simpler usability issues with minor theme edits, probably a good candidate for me to try to fix. Some may be device driver bugs. And some may be hardware malfunctions. I’ll probably focus on things that do not appear to be related to hardware malfunctions (i.e. themes, general usability). Will try to differentiate or verify if the hardware has problems, or if it’s software related, by comparing stock phone with this /e/ OS.

Finally, I do not know how, but if you could point me to resources or instruct me how to build this image from source, I could try tinkering with things. I have Android Studio installed, using Windows 10, on an AMD CPU. I can’t use the AMD virtualization, as I need Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2, which relies on Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtualization Platform, and is mutually exclusive with the Android AMD Virtualization. But it’d probably run fast enough for limited testing, I guess.

There are a lot of Howto build in this community.
There are several ways to build.

@itsclarence

Oh, this is awesome! I have a N910F (several, actually) and will definitelly test your version as soon as i get the time! Hopefully today, otherwise during rest of the week. Will try and rapport here after that (if i find the way back, this is my first day on this forum…)
Also I just learned how to pull logs with syslog, do you want a log?

Thank you so much for this!!

Edit:
I just flashed your version (couldn’t wait haha) and it boots fine and fast!! But i often get sim card failure here too after rebooting. The thing is, i stopped updating LOS on this phone because on versions later than LOS16 i had big problems with sim cards losing connection frequently and it was hard to get it back to connect, sometimes it took many reboots. Apparently that was one of big problems for LOS on this device for some reason.

But I will get back to you in a while after i done some more testing… Thank you so much for your effort!

Btw - there is actually a later version of LOS, LOS18, based on android 11. could you work on that one too?

@itsclarence anyway to get this ROM? (Link returns no file) I have a couple old TMobile Note 4s (trlte, SM-N910T) from a few years back. I’d like to flash /e/ to them.

I can’t find it either…somethig went wrong on my side. I’ll try to build a R-version. (based on LOS18.1)

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It would be great if you could test this R-build.
Please be safe and make a backup first and let me know the outcome.

https://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=14943124697586352699

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Thank you for providing this. I will place here anything I notice not functioning.

  1. The window or task manager button on the bottom left of the screen does not revert to the windows so that you can close out processes/apps. Specifically, THIS button does not do anything, unable to view processes/apps and close them out.

  2. Encrypting the phone puts it into a bootloop. Re-flashing now.

  3. Not sure the assumption on this with unofficial builds but SELinux is not being enforced.

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Thnx for testing…
Ok, then these buttons don’t seem to work on these early builds for R.
I had the same issues on my klte (S5) build. I’ll build a Q-version tomorrow…

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Have you seen : >settings >system >buttons ?

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No, I already flashed another unofficial ROM to the device. Is that a setting that could possibly allow the button to be functional? I could flash back and try. I would really like to have /e/ up on this device so I don’t have to tweak all the settings to lessen calls home to Google servers.

*I have to try… flashing back now
*The “Recent apps switcher” function will not work with any button :frowning:

*Trying a different launcher now…
*No go, won’t work… looking forward to the Q build from @itsclarence thanks for the suggestion @piero.

Hey folks, I have a Verizon Note 4 and I am happy to test these things too, thanks for your work, where shall I start to download a test version? Post number? Direct link?

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https://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=14943124697586353107

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Thank you @itsclarence

Not sure what is wrong but I can’t get this build past the “e” with a bouncing ball under it at boot. I’ve flashed it 3 times. It just sits there and keeps bouncing.

*I’ve flashed a couple other ROMs since with no issue. I also re-downloaded the file a second time and tried again just incase the download was corrupted somehow, still no luck. Stuck on the “e” with bouncing ball.

Sorry to hear it’s not working. I’ll try a new build later this week…

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Try this build please… should be working

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I will get to this ASAP. I already set my 2 Note 4s up with some unofficial non-/e/ builds but I am gonna have to wipe one to test this. I have been using the phones to test what @marcdw
has been teaching in THIS thread.

Thank you @itsclarence .

Hi again!

Not sure if you’re still developing, @itsclarence , but if you are - could i kindly ask you to try and build /e/ version of the last usable version of R for Note 4, before the developer threw in the towel? It’s the 20211107 version, the first one in the Lineage 18-list. That would be really kind of you. And I will gladly buy you coffee if you want.

https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/1YX-AodWUl5xTCPE8lfMvR0zsjQLe1EFR

It seems this Community is not active

The forums are very active. If this thread has received no response it will be because no-one has anything useful to say here :slight_smile: