I often these days think for myself, ”well, this escalated quickly…” and then I end up in an interesting journey that I would not normally undertake. What is ”normal” in this sense has shifted and it’s a sense of confidence boost assisted by AI-tools. No point in beating around the bush here, where I would normally think ”but come on, compiling a operating system on my own is not something I should do – it will takes weeks if not months or years!” is together with an AI like asking a Nerdy friend ”how about we explore this thought”. So yesterday I attended the release event of Murena /e/OS 4.0 with my Fairphone 6 in my hand ready to install the OS. I could not figure out where to find the release files (usually a set of installer files that will be sent to the phone hardware via USB) but after a while I came to the conclusion that it didn’t yet exist. It had been released for a few selected phones but not mine. A bit dissapointed I went through with the install anyways using the previous version (3.7) just to learn the ropes of locking/unlocking bootloader, fighting with drivers and get familiar with the payload files (I will make a separate post about this!).
A few hours later it was a complete success, and I now had a magic moment of experiencing something very few people have experienced – an operating system that is ”pure” and ”free” from extra entities pulling data-strings from afar.
I could have stayed at this point, but since the installation was now part of my skill repertoire – it didn’t take long before I started to wonder ”is there really not any 4.0 version available?”. Visited the community forums, and a lot of pages and the Murena GitLab repo stating that the source is released but no build exist yet. I also came across a page stating that building it would be ”trivial”, although I doubted that. Then I ask Claude and somehow was met with a rather cheerful outline of the process (actually a couple of different suggestions to pick from) which seemed both according to my understanding correct and also somewhat suspiciously ”simple”. Here I should probably have stopped, but the challenge was now right in front of me – I could have my own build within a few hours if everything played out. I accepted, vaguely remembering that last time I tried something like this fifteen years ago it didn’t turn out that well. Usually these processes throw errors which requires in depth knowledge or extreme persistence. The difference this time around is that I now have a competent companion AI that I know how to work with and respect.
At 63% and working our way through the compilation tree, we hit another snag – an error related to stress on our available memory. Claude is confident that its related to memory flags not being adjusted for our machine and immediately gets to work with a slight adjustment. It double checks with online sources to confirm that others have similar issues at this point. If this works out I can say that I co-compiled my own operating system. If not, I learned a few details and got some insights into how the process goes.
At 100% we got a BUILD SUCCESS and then we flashed the phone. Its actually working!