For basic building instructions refer to Building 101 and incorporate the below patches after syncing or use lin-* forks.

Old Android versions can be pretty difficult to build nowadays and thus this guide was created so that you can do just that.

Assuming you set up your build enviromnet already you still have to install legacy java and python for Android 8 and below. Newer versions ship the jdk inside the source.

The Lineage wiki has a comprehensive guide on that for ubuntu/-based distros and fedora also still ships openjdk 8 in their repos, which you can install by running:

sudo dnf install java-1.8.0-openjdk java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel


	

Note that you might need to use update-alternatives to set the proper symlinks and use the old java/javac version. In addition to that you need to allow Tls V1/1.1 by removing TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 from jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms within /etc/java-8-openjdk/security/java.security on debian based distros.

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/crypto-policies/LEGACY/java.txt /etc/crypto-policies/back-ends/java.config;


	

works on fedora/-based distros and does the same thing

You should verify that

java --version


	

and

javac --version


	

outputs something like openjdk/javac 1.8 for Android 7 and 8

Next is python. You need python 2 to be set as default for Android 9 and below and python 3 for Android 10 and up. You may need to manually install the python2 package and symlink it to python using update-alternatives just like java. Verify the version once again using

python --version


	

The output should be python 2.7.xx

Now run (A7/8)

export LC_ALL=C && export ANDROID_JACK_VM_ARGS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -XX:+TieredCompilation -Xmx4G"


	

and continue the build as usual.

After verifying it boots you can implement the security backports from the lineage os gerrit. For android 7 you can repopick the topics n-asb-2021-10 up to the most recent backports n-asb-2025-01 and tzdb_N as of writing this guide. lin14-mGoms is a notable fork that provides substratum, microg support and asb backports.