 Today, we're going to do something that I'm very excited about. It's something I've looked forward to a while. I did a video saying I was going to do a video on this a little bit ago. We're going to install GSI Android, linear Joest version of it, onto my Motorola PowerG 2021 Borneo is the code name of it. But this should work on main devices with little differences. So what is GSI? It's not GIS, GIS has to do with mapping. This is GSI, it's generic system image. This is most Android devices since 2019. Basically, I believe it's Android 9 and up. If you have that, there's a good chance that your device is going to be compatible, and you'll be able to install a generic image. So instead of a custom ROM that is designed specifically for your device, you can get a generic Android image that will work on pretty much any device. This is because the firmware for most devices are on partition. So we're just replacing basically the system partition and another partition that verifies the system partition to make sure it knows that we're changing it. I've only done this on the one phone so far, but it should be similar for most phones. Again, you just need to unlock the bootloader. I'm not going over that in this video because that's something that I've gone over before and it's different on each device. But if you have your bootloader unlocked, we're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you my notes here real quick. There'll be a link to these notes in the description. I've done this twice today. I'm very excited that I've been able to do this. So let's go ahead and I'm going to turn the camera so that it's looking at my phone. Okay, as you can see, I have a fresh installed stock ROM. I actually just did a video on doing this and I just finished recording that a couple of minutes ago. So what do we need to do? So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to reboot into the bootloader. You can run, if you have Android debugging bridge going, you can always use ADB reboot bootloader. Since I haven't even logged in yet, I don't have that set up. I'm going to hold down the power button, press restart, and then hold down the volume button while it's restarting until I get to my bootloader screen. Okay, perfect. So what are we going to need? We are going to need, looking at my notes here, we're going to need this VB meta image. This is basically going to wipe out the VB meta image. From my understanding, that's just an image that basically checks make sure your system partition hasn't been changed, basically. Basically, we're going to use that to disable that feature so that we can flash the new system image and the system will boot and not go. That's not the right image. So let's go ahead and grab that. We'll just use this W get command and we will download that. There we go. It's very small, doesn't take very long at this point. Again, my phone is in the bootloader mode. What I'm going to do is I am now, move this off the screen so I just copy and paste stuff. We're going to use the fast boot. Again, I also assume that you know what fast boot is. It's kind of an advanced tutorial and that you have fast boot installed on your system. It's in your repositories, if not. Fast boot dash dash disable dash verify, dash dash disable dash verification flash and then VB meta and that image. We do that and hopefully everything went well. See, it says finished okay. We downgraded. It says warning, it downgraded. Now, this is the part that kind of tripped me up a little bit, part of this is we're in fast boot mode but we want to go into fast boot D mode. And the way you do that is by saying fast boot while you're already at the bootloader screen, fast boot, reboot, fast boot. So fast boot, reboot, fast boot. It's going to reboot the device and you'll get a different screen here. You'll be in fast boot D mode, which basically, from my understanding, it just gives you some more powerful fast boot commands I guess, stuff that you normally wouldn't want to do because you don't want to mess things up. Now, a lot of tutorials will tell you at this point, one of the things you can do is to try to flash that system image. So where do we get the system image? So, let's going back to our screen here. Again, I'll have links to my notes in the description. There's this URL here, which brings you to this website, which gives you a list of GSI images you can use. And again, these are generic and should run on most Android devices. We can get the Android open source project. We can get one from Google. We have all these other ones. I like Lineage OS. There's two of them here. I just chose the Lineage OS Lite. So we go to that download page and we download that. So when we download that, it's going to be an XZ file. So how do you extract an XZ file? Well, we're going to do XZ, I believe it's dash XF and then you give it the file name. Actually, it's XZ dash D dash V and then the file name of the image. I've already done that. It takes a couple of minutes. It will extract it. Here we have the image file. So we have the image we downloaded to flash the VB meta. And then now we have our image here. Now, going back to my notes, the next thing you might think you would do, and on some systems will work, you'll do use fast boot and give it that image name. So like that. That doesn't work when I do that. Well, let's go ahead and run it and see what happens. Yeah, that's what I was expecting to happen. Just I was expecting it to happen faster. Not enough space to resize partition. Okay, not an issue. We're hurrying fast boot D. What are we going to do? We're going to run this command. Fast boot, delete logic partition product, run that. Then we will do the same thing, but with product underneath underscore A and underscore B. So what's happening is our system partition is on a super partition, which has multiple partitions. And basically we're clearing out partitions we don't need to make space for the system image. One of the things you might want to look into doing is deleting the user data and erasing cache. And if it says it doesn't exist, that's fine. It's a brand new install, so there probably is no cache set up yet. And now that we've done that, we should be able to run that command we tried earlier, which is fast boot, flash, system, lineage, or whatever your image is. We're going to do that and give it a moment here. There we go. And it's going to start. In my particular case, it's split up into 11 different packages. And I'll probably take, I'm going to guess, a little less than the stock image because it's definitely smaller than the stock image. But I'm going to guess, well, let's see, 10 seconds there and there's 11 of them. So we're going to say probably about two minutes. I'm going to pause the video and then we'll come back. Okay, so we're almost there. We're at nine out of 11. So let me explain what's happening. It's sending a part. It's splitting the image into pieces, 11 different pieces. It's sending them, which takes about 10 seconds for each chunk. And then when it gets there, it writes it, which takes about two seconds, it looks like. So we're almost there. And when we're done, the only thing that we're going to do is we're going to run our fast boot dash W command. Here we go. We'll run that fast boot dash W. And that basically does a factory reset. So we did the erase user data and erase cache before. I don't know if initially you need to do that since we're doing that after. And now all we have to do is do our fast boot reboot. And then our phone should restart and it should boot into a generic version of Lineage OS. Again, what does it mean by generic? So when you get Lineage OS, normally you would get it for a set device and it knows about that device and it's customized that device and it only works for that device. If someone made it for your device, that's awesome. If not, you can always do it yourself, but that takes hundreds of gigs of files that you have to download to compile or build, I guess I should say. There's probably some compiling going on. And then it takes hours and hours and hours. From my understanding, I've never done it because once they said you have to download 100 to 300 gigs worth of stuff, I'm like, I'm out. You can see Lineage OS, you got your icon or your load screen going here. And again, as I talked in the last video, if you do a stock ROM from whatever manufacturer, even once you got it booted, there's gonna take at least 10 minutes doing a setup. Look at this, this is already done booting and we should get our screen here. And look, start. Yes, I'm in the United States, date and time, check. I'm normally I log in my wifi, I'm just gonna say skip for now. Next, next, next, or this is set fingerprint stuff. Let's skip that for now. I can choose to skip all this stuff. Protect your phone with a pin, I'm not gonna do that. I don't need to restore any apps. And look, I'm into a working system. Now, as I was saying, this is not specifically built for this device and it will work. And I tell you, I skipped over it. The fingerprint reader does work on my particular device. Some devices, from my understanding, it may not, the wifi does work. The camera clearly works, that we got the front and rear camera or rear and front. And then one thing that I've noticed with this particular device, and again, because it's not built specifically for this phone, different phones will have in different places, my camera is right here and it's like over the words in the corner. There's probably a way to adjust that. But that's the sort of thing you get with a generic image. It's not gonna know the little nuances of your hardware. So that's it, that's all it took and it's gonna be lighter weight. It's probably gonna run better. There's not all that extra applications on there. Lineage OS is great and now I can install on any device even if it's not officially supported. I haven't really played with this. I just showed you everything. Like I said, I know the wifi works, I know the fingerprint reader works, the cameras work and the wifi works. Other than that, I haven't gotten into it in details but I'm so happy that I got this working. So I've had this phone for a year. I just got a new phone and I always wanted Lineage OS on this old phone but it wasn't officially supported and I didn't feel like building it myself. So now I can, I can do it for my new device as well. What I went through, we didn't install Google apps. There's an option to do that. If you've installed custom ROM, it's basically the same option. You just have to flash it before you boot it. But that's basically it. I thought I would share this again because I came into issues when it came to the super partition on mine and the things I had to do was I had to go into fast boot D mode and then I also had to do that, delete the logic partition. Again, there'll be a link in the description to my notes that you saw earlier in the video. I do hope that you found this useful. Please visit filmsbychrist.com, that's Chris the K and I hope that you found this useful. I hope that this encourages you to try these generic system images because I think this is the best thing to happen to Android, almost ever. So thanks for watching and I hope that you have a great day.