Replicant is a distribution of Android aiming at being 100% free. No proprietary drivers, firmwares or applications. It currently support few devices. The latest member of the family is the Nexus S, created by Samsung and branded by Google themselves. When I heard about the Nexus S port of Replicant, I ordered one.

Today I have installed Replicant on my Nexus S. I wanted the latest and greatest code, so I had to build myself a set of images. To do that, I had to check out the code repository of 13 GB! On my old 2 GHz dual core, the build process took about two hours. Meanwhile, I “rooted” my phone, or unlocked the boot loader that is.

The freshly built images installed without any troubles at all. Booting and logging in to the phone network went smoothly as well. Calling, sending and receiving sms worked fine. The cameras (front and rear) works well for taking pictures (in colors!), but the preview is grayscaled and the app is crashing when I try to record video.

So now to the problems. Unnecessary to mention is that the wifi, bluetooth and GPS does not have any drivers (or I am actually not sure about the GPS… It is registered, but I have no apps to try it with yet). I have not been able to register for the data network service. This is the most critical issue that I need to have resolved sooner than later. A less critical issue, but still an issue, is that special codes for refilling my phone account and checking status, does not work. Worth mentioning may be that I use Swedish Telia Refill with 0.5 GB data transfer a month. The last problem I have encountered so far is that not having 3D acceleration enabled really slows down many of the features of Android.

I will probably not update this post, but rather write new ones as soon as I have new things to report. Stay tuned!