InstallingDebianOn/Fairphone/Fairphone5

About

The Fairphone 5 is a sustainable smartphone with a modular design that emphasizes repairability, featuring ten swappable spare parts and a removable back panel made of recycled plastic.

Built to last for years to come
Fast, powerful, reliable - supported until 2031
Made with fair and recycled materials

Support Status

On Trixie:

Works

Encrypted rootfs (Needs another computer to generate images with encrypted rootfs, no installer yet)
HDMI/DP output,
battery charging,
front and wide-angle camera,
USB host/client,
WiFi (client and AP mode), Bluetooth
flashlight and more
SD card

Needs modem firmware from extracted from postmarketOS

modem (4GLTE/5GNR)
eSIM
GPS

Doesn't work

Speakers (use BT audio or Type-C DAC instead),
main camera,
phone calls?
auto rotate,
fingerprint sensor and more

Prequisites

Tools

apt install fastboot

Bootloader unlock

If your phone is the Google edition, you will need to connect the phone to the internet at least once to unlock the bootloader. Connectivity is required when enabling the 'OEM unlocking' option in Developer Options. The Murena edition doesn't have this restriction.

Unlock the bootloader according to the official instructions. You do not need to unlock critical partitions.

Installation

Download a mobian-sc7280-* image from https://images.mobian-project.org/qcom/weekly/ and then flash the boot image and the rootfs from fastboot.

Extract the archive.

tar xJf mobian-sc7280-*.tar.xz

To enter fastboot, hold down power and volume-down while the phone is off.

fastboot flash boot mobian-sc7280-*.boot-fp5.img
fastboot flash userdata mobian-sc7280-*.rootfs.img
fastboot erase dtbo reboot

Your phone will reboot twice and you should see a login screen, the default password is 1234 . You might need to manually reboot after the initial installation.

A typical installation looks like this:

$ fastboot flash boot mobian-sc7280-plasma-mobile-20250824.boot-fp5.img 
Sending 'boot_a' (28792 KB)                        OKAY [  0.909s]
Writing 'boot_a'                                   OKAY [  0.043s]
Finished. Total time: 0.976s
$ fastboot flash userdata mobian-sc7280-plasma-mobile-20250824.rootfs.img 
Warning: skip copying userdata image avb footer (userdata partition size: 229783318528, userdata image size: 140730939396144).
Sending sparse 'userdata' 1/6 (741840 KB)          OKAY [ 23.701s]
Writing 'userdata'                                 OKAY [  0.010s]
...
Sending sparse 'userdata' 6/6 (584394 KB)          OKAY [ 18.984s]
Writing 'userdata'                                 OKAY [  0.002s]
Finished. Total time: 147.766s
$ fastboot erase dtbo reboot 
Erasing 'dtbo'                                     OKAY [  0.014s]
Rebooting                                          OKAY [  0.000s]
Finished. Total time: 0.070s

Audio

See https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp5)#Audio Experimental work on pmOS: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/3793#note_518427

InstallingDebianOnFairphoneFairphone5