While cleaning up my work room a few months ago, I found an old Asus Zenfone 2 tucked away in a desk drawer.
The Zenfone 2 is a neat idea executed poorly. It’s dual-SIM (which is why I bought it — it was my China phone, with a China Mobile and a Hong Kong SIM), solidly constructed, with a really good screen. However, one of the SIM slots is 2G-only, it’s using an Intel Atom (x86) processor, and the battery is infamous for randomly dying.
I hooked it up to a USB charger, figuring I’d give the battery a good solid regenerating charge to see if it was worth keeping, and promptly forgot about it. I discovered it again a few days ago (still charging) and tried it out.
Much to my surprise, it booted.
It was supported by LineageOS 14.1. I did a quick build, flashed it onto the device … and it still worked. I’ve added it to the weekly build rooster.
Stock TWRP 3.3.1 (as sourced from twrp.me) works fine. The MM bootloader is probably required; I’ve put a copy of the upgrader in the z00a directory.
Magisk will not work. There’s something odd going on with the bootloader’s kernel image integrity check — after Magisk injects itself into the image, the bootloader will refuse to load it, choosing instead to enter recovery. The fix there is to use LineageOS’ addonsu package. The binary on the official LineageOS site will not work, as one of the ABIs apparently changed in the past few years. I’m now generating the addonsu (and addonsu-remove) package along with the regular build for each platform.
On a different note: I’ve moved the repository from lineageos.disavowed.jp to lineageos.rezrov.net. These builds are apparently a bit popular; I’m seeing people grab these from all over the place (referred from YouTube tutorials, Russian and Japanese forums, in addition to the usual XDA traffic). That makes me happy, but …
… unfortunately, only six people have donated to the webhosting fund. I’ve had to bring the repository in-house to cut costs. I’m really disappointed in the gimme-gimme-gimme mindset displayed by the vast majority of LineageOS users.
I’ll keep the builds available as long as I can, but do not be surprised if the site is one day replaced with a static “so long and thanks for all the fish” page to keep my ISP from throttling my bandwidth. At that point I’ll post my build script and redirect software-lineageos@disavowed.jp to /dev/null.
Anyway … enjoy the Z00A builds.