UPDATE: And this weekend finally saw the rise of a new Lineage, previously popular as Cyanogen Mod community. The official builds for Lineage OS are now live and can be accessed through the downloads page. Though it had been stated that nearly 80+ builds will be released on the weekend but only a handful of those have currently gone live.
Official builds for Nexus 6P (angler), Nexus 5X (bullhead), Moto G4 and G4 Plus (athene), Nextbit Robin (ether), and Xiaomi Redmi 1S (armani) were released last night. There are also some experimental builds attached along with each smartphone’s page. These, as stated below, it’ll enable you to flash the ROM atop your CM installation and then make a switch to Lineage. You’ll also be required to use MD5 hashes attached to the builds as private authentication keys.
PREVIOUSLY: Internal strifes and an attempt to become the Android killer didn’t fare well with Cyanogen Inc. The company has recently dissolved most of its operations and parted ways with its founder. This also led to the subsequent end of support for the open-source CyanogenMod builds. But, the community collated resources and planned to keep the CM project alive as Lineage OS. And now, they’ve announced that the first set of officials build are ready to drop this weekend.
The blog post on Lineage’s official website details that the builds will support “Marshmallow and Nougat capable devices.” The community is further starting off the project with support for over 80 smartphones. The Lineage OS builds will be delivered for users on a weekly basis by default. And they’ll be signed with a private key for authentication and signature permission control. This means the team is continuing the tasks left behind CM but with an added touch of their own.
In addition, Lineage OS isn’t packing one of the most prominent features of Cyanogen Mod builds. These builds, the blog says, wouldn’t be shipping with an unlocked root by default. But if you’re willing to root your device then Lineage will provide you with optional flashable zip files. You’ll need to flash it just once to unlock root privileges for your system. And if you’re compiling a ROM yourself, just check to include root support.
The Lineage OS community is completely aware of the pain of switching ROMs and losing your data. So, as a solution for the same, it will offer experimental data migration builds for CyanogenMod users. These builds will be available alongside the weekly releases but only for the next two months. They will allow you to flash your device running existing CM 13 or CM 14.1 installations and keep all your data intact. After installing the same, you can easily make a switch to normal weekly-updated Lineage OS builds.
These official Lineage OS build will most likely be available this weekend. You can navigate to this download page to check if your device is supported and a build is available for the same. Talking about the bare minimum existence and design of the download pages, the blog post adds,
Notably, all three of these sites (and this blog) are open sourced – you can contribute to them via our Gerrit instance! Bear with us if these sites look bare at the moment, they will grow with content and design as we continue marching forward.
