i bought myself a new mobile phone, to replace my good four-year-old "sony ericsson xperia pro" (the one with the great slide out keyboard). i chose to buy the "samsung galaxy s5 mini". first thing of course was to get rid of samsung's touchwiz and the super bloated rom with all the (for me) useless pre-installed and on-boot-launched stuff i will never ever need. i really enjoyed the clean cyanogenmod i had installed on my old phone - and that is what i wanted for the new phone too. but it turned out there is no easy way to install it as there is not even a stable release for my phone. but, fortunately there is an unofficial cm-12.1 build for the "kminilte", which is cyanogenmod's build name for my phone. lots of thanks go out to "hennymcc", who did the work on this release. it was also his howto that i followed to get my phone the shiny new android operating system called "lollipop". unfortunately the instructions did not work out of the box for me (oh, surprise). when trying to flash the recovery image, i always got this message: turned out, using twrp-recovery with a special kminilte-build, as described in this howto from "techbeasts", provided the correct way and recovery image ("twrp_kminilte-build3.tar") to get it working for me - hooray. happy, happy me. but some things still had to be fixed, like mounting the external sdcard in read-write mode to store data there. so i used the adb shell to remount "/system" via great thing is, cyanogenmod 12.1 comes preinstalled with a "vim" editor, so it was a pleasantly easy thing to add the line with the "sdcard_rw" gid to "/system/etc/permission/platform.xml" with my editor of choice. so the final content for the "WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" permissions was after a reboot, my phone was able to write to the external sd-card. wonderful. another thing that does not work for me, was to encrypt "/data". maybe i will be able to fix that soon, or maybe it simply is just broken in the unofficial build i used. another thing i also would have loved to use was the fingerprint scanner without storing information in some big company's cloud storage, as samsung might have done that with the touchwiz implementation of the scanner. or maybe not. who knows what they really store. so far i am really happy, yet i miss the slide out keyboard, which was really an awesome feature of my old xperia pro. but the galaxy s5 mini has gorilla-glass and is IP67 certified, which means it is dust- ("dust tight") and waterproof ("immersion up to one metre for at least 30 minutes"), which actually should make it a good outdoor phone too. good bye, good old xperia pro, welcome new galaxy s5 mini.