Vollkorn in Australien

Moin,

This is a quick summary of how to flash your Samsung Galaxy S III i9305 with a custom ROM.

Okay, the title is not right because I didn't use the only free software only Android distribution Replicant but Cyanogenmod (CM) instead.

Before I got my new phone I read on the internet that it's almost identical with the very popular and well supported Samsung Galaxy S III i9300, but has 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB and additionally supports LTE. Don't be fooled, this means it has a different chipset and needs different drivers. But Samsung isn't very helpful with supporting the necessary information to get those drivers into ROMs and you're probably better off with a Nexus device.

This leads to the problem that there is no officially supported CM-ROM for this nice phone. Too bad. But luckily there is an unofficial ROM. Plus a ton of pitfalls to brick your phone.

Let's get started. I did this all on an up-to-date Ubuntu 12.10. I went to the official CM page for the i9300 thinking it would work on my i9305. IT WON'T WORK, IT WILL BREAK, DON'T TRY IT! The general instructions will still work, but you need different ROM images.

The basic idea is to install a recovery ROM which essentially is a very small rescue system able to flash other ROMs and use this to install CM.

heimdall is a command line utility to flash files on your phone. It's the open source alternative to Odin and can flash the same files. Just rename the Odin files ending in .tar.md5 to .tar, untar them and use the extracted binary image file (*.img) with heimdall.

Download heimdall, but use the 32 bit version. I couldn't get the 64 bit version to work at all on my 64 bit system.

Get the ClockWork Recovery (CWR) ROM for the i9305 from xda-developers.

Do not connect your phone to the USB. Hold down Volume Down, Home and Power in order to boot into the built in flash tool. You should see a screen telling you that you'll void your warranty and so on. Press Volume Up to confirm that you know what you're doing.

Now connect your phone to your computer and open a terminal. Type

# heimdall flash --recovery recovery.img --no-reboot

where recovery.img is the unpacked CWR ROM. Your phone will be flashed within a few seconds.

Now disconnect your phone and choose the option wipe data/factory reset. If you don't do this your phone will not boot.

Turn off your phone, get the unofficial CM 10.1 image found on the xda-developers announcement forum thread. (It's also a great resource to read). The trick now is to get the .zip file on your phone. You can't use adb to copy the file on the phone over the USB at this moment because this requires a running Android. And you rather don't want to anyway, but instead use a SD card. Just put a micro SD card into an adapter and use it on your computer (or use another phone with a rooted Android and SD card slot to download the file onto it). Don't even think about using your stock Samsung firmware for that. You need root and developer extensions enabled.

You might also want to download the closed source Google Apps for CM 10.1.

After you placed your CM image and the Google Apps on the root of your SD card and put it into your phones SD card slot, hold down Volume UP (not DOWN), Home and Power to boot into CWR. Then choose to install a ROM from external SD card and install first CM and afterwards Google Apps. Now you should be ready to reboot and enjoy your rooted, more free than before Samsung phone.

If you did a mistake and cannot boot your phone anymore (it's stuck at the b/w boot screen saying it's product name) then follow the instructions on Recovering IMEI And Data Connection After Flashing WRONG Root Package Intended For I9300. The linked Odin image can be easily unpacked and flashed with heimdall as previously explained. This helped me to get my phone boot again after flashing it with the wrong ROM.

Hope this helps
Jan Girlich

Oh, wieder Zeit für ein paar Wutausbrüche. Gut, dass es Alice/O2 dafür gibt. Über die DSL-Ausfälle beschwere ich mich nicht mehr, an die habe ich mich gewöhnt seitdem aus Alice O2 wurde. Gerade der hier und ich bin dank blau.de per UMTS im Netz.

O2 online sendet mir einen Newsletter mit korrektem Namen an meine Emailadresse. Ich nehme an, dass die noch seit 2007 in deren Datenbank steht als ich mein Handy mal bei Alice hatte, was ich aber schon längst dort gekündigt habe. Beim DSL-Vertrag meiner Mutter (ja, ich lebe noch bei ihr im Haus, zahl du doch die Hamburger Mietpreise) ist diese Emailadresse auf jeden Fall nicht angegeben. Kein Problem, denke ich, am Ende der Mail ist ja ein Link zum Abmelden. Schnell draufgeklickt und ich lande auf einer Seite auf der ich mich im Kundencenter einloggen soll. Wie gesagt ist die Adresse nicht im Vertrag meiner Mutter angegeben, in ihrem Account sind alle Newsletter abbesteltt und ich selbst habe keine Kundendaten um mich einzuloggen, da ich eben kein Kunde bin.

Also mal eben bei der Bestellhotline unter 0800 - 422 04 21 angerufen und nachgefragt was ich da machen kann. Der Herr war sehr freundlich und empfahl das Kontaktformular auf der Webseite zu nutzen. Ich fragte zurück welches der drei angebotenen Formulare ich denn nutzen solle und las ihm die Optionen vor, was ihn verwirrte, denn bei ihm sind die Optionen gänzlich anders. Darauf hin sagte er mir ich solle doch einfach eine Mail an info@o2online.de senden.

DELIVERY FAILURE: Error transferring to MAILSERVER1.VIAGINTERKOM.DE; Maximum hop count exceeded. Message probably in a routing loop.

Your message

Subject: Re: o2 News März: Neue Tablets - bequem auf der Couch, perfekt unterwegs.

was not delivered to:

vertragskunden-kontakt@kana.o2online.de

because:

Error transferring to MAILSERVER1.VIAGINTERKOM.DE; Maximum hop count exceeded. Message probably in a routing loop.

Nice, den kannte ich noch nicht. Aber irgendwie schien die Nachricht dann doch noch angekommen zu sein, denn ich erhielt eine Antwort.

Ihre Alice Kundenbetreuung - Automatische Antwort auf Ihre eMail

Automatische Antwort auf Ihre eMail
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Leider können wir keine Antworten an die von Ihnen genutzte eMail-Adresse bearbeiten.

Gerne können Sie uns wie folgt kontaktieren:

per Hotline:
https://www.alice-dsl.de/alicehelp/index.jsp?showContentNodeId=272&type=6#272

per Online-Kontaktformular:
https://www.alice-dsl.de/alicehelp/index.jsp?showContentNodeId=273&type=6#273

per Post:
https://www.alice-dsl.de/alicehelp/index.jsp?showContentNodeId=274&type=6#274


Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Ihre Alice Kundenbetreuung

Anbieterkennzeichnung: https://www.alice-dsl.de/kundencenter/export/de/residential/impressum.html
Alice gibts in immer mehr Anschlussgebieten. Hier prüfen: http://www.alice-dsl.de/kundencenter/export/de/residential/produkte/produktauswahl.html

Schauen wir uns doch mal die Optionen an. Schnell dreimal draufgeklickt und siehe da: Alle leiten mich auf die selbe Produktangebotsseite!

Noch einmal geschaut und ich finde eine andere Kontaktseite und versuche jetzt dort mein Problem über den Kontakt als Interessent zu lösen. Ich berichte darüber. Aber soweit: Fail. Wieso brauchen solche Lapalien immer so viel Stress?

Update 13.03.2012:
Yay

Guten Tag Herr Girlich,

vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail.

Bitte entschuldigen Sie die entstandenen Unannehmlichkeiten.

Wir bedauern, dass Sie auf die o2 Newsletter verzichten möchten.

Ihre E-Mail-Adresse > vollkorn@cryptobitch.de< wurde abgemeldet.

Ich hoffe, dass ich Ihr Anliegen zu Ihrer vollen Zufriedenheit klären konnte. Gerne begrüßen wir Sie ein andermal als unseren Kunden.

Ich wünsche Ihnen eine angenehme und schöne Woche.

Ihre o2 Kundenbetreuerin
...

Update 14.02.2012:

Das neue can do Magazin ist da - jetzt entdecken und gewinnen

Folgen Sie dem Waschbären und gewinnen Sie

can do
Ihr Magazin

*********************************************************

Lieber Herr Girlich,

willkommen zur neuen Ausgabe Ihrer can do, dem Online-
Kundenmagazin von o2...

ARGH!

Update 18.02.2012:
Boah! Insgesamt zwei weitere Newsletter bekommen und heute ein ganz persönliches Geburtstagsgeschenk. Aber am 18.03. ist gar nicht mein Geburtstag und ich wüsste nicht wo ich das jemals angegeben hätte. So langsam habe ich das Gefühl da versucht mich jemand zu verarschen

Well, my sleeping schedule has been messed up pretty badly lately. Many reasons like pulling an all nighter and crashing afterwards, partying, not having time or a good enough place for a nap during my day etc. But I'm not giving up. I believe getting a wake-up routine established will help a lot. Working on it.

I also started recording my sleeping times to evaluate how I'm doing and if it's really working, i.e. if I get more time out of my days. I'm using an app called 'Timesheet' which has a csv export. I'll post the results here as soon as I finished the first month of recording. Right now it looks like I spent an average of 7.5 hrs sleeping each 24hr period. Not impressive.

There are many references about historic persons trying polyphasic sleeping. Most notably probably Buckminster Fuller who invented what he called the Dymaxion sleep cycle in the 1950s. This interview explains the word Dymaxion and talks a bit about his life. His idea was to sleep 30 minutes every 6 hrs and he supposedly did it for quite a long time until his wife got fed up or he adjusted to his business partners' schedules. Whichever version of the story you tend to believe more.

Before that many people are believed to have been sleeping polyphasically like Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. But those reports usually do not withstand biographical scrutiny.

More interestingly are the recent polyphasic sleeping endeavours, which are mostly for military use. In extreme stress situations such sleeping patterns keep your total sleeping time down which can save your life, but the general alertness and performance is worse than with a full nights rest. It's a great thing when you're sailing around the world single-handed and want to make sure not to crash into another boat, but probably not a good idea if you want to work creatively all day long.

In the past two weeks I attended Datenspuren in Dresden and a nation-wide meeting of Chaos macht Schule (Chaos at School catches on, witty German play on words) near Bonn. As usual there is much to do and see during such events and you wish you could stay up late and hang out with all the wonderful people, but still be up early in the morning to get some of the free breakfast and catch all the talks while still being able to take a shower.

Everyman 4.5 is great in these regards. I usually hung out until 2 am with everyone, one night every event I spent hours geocaching and made a lot new friends, but still I woke up at 7 am, had a relaxed start in the day, took a shower, got breakfast, helped out the organizers in setting everything up for the day etc. and enjoyed a full day of talks, workshops and everything.

Only downside is that I need to find a spot to nap which can be really hard on such events, but I usually managed to do that. You get experienced with this skill real quick.

All in all I handle my conferences like my day to day life sleep-wise. While everyone else is complaining about sleep deprevation during such a long and exhausting event, I just carry on as if nothing much happened. No catching up sleep afterwards, no extra rest needed. This is an awesome feeling.

PS: I gave a (German) lightning talk about Sleephacking in Dresden (and some other stuff, it's the two talks before this one). It starts at 35:30.

Lately napping works really great. It still feels like ages until I fall asleep, but I wake up in time. Actually I wake up about 3-5 minutes before my alarm and am feeling rested. And in general I feel great. No trouble getting up after my 4.5 hrs core sleep anymore, too. And I noticed I feel very tired around the times of my naps. I guess I'm through the adjustment phase. Feels great

So I upgraded and as always everything breaks. Here are the kinks I experienced so far and what I did about them.

- Synaptic dies with an error message:

jan@jan-x61 ~ % sudo synaptic
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range'
what(): vector::_M_range_check

I did nothing about it, after I learned Synaptic was dropped I started switching to the Software Center. Why not, if this is supposed to be the future for Ubuntu? No problem for me.

- Alexandria entirely dropped out of the package servers. No wonder because its development stalled a while ago and it needs a couple of deprecated libraries. The alternatives are GCstar (Gnome) and Tellico (KDE). Although I despise KDE and prefer Gnome and both programs offer import from Alexandria databases, I had to use Tellico because GCstar crashes on the import.

- The new Nautilus keyboard navigation sucks. When you start typing the name of a folder the previous behaviour was to show a little textbox on the bottom right corner containing what you typed so far until you clicked somewhere else or hit Escape. Now this little box disappears only milliseconds after typing and you can't see what you typed.

Also the text is kept in the buffer when changing folders which means you have to hit Escape before keying in the name of the next sub-folder you want to go to.

Lastly when entering a new folder it doesn't have the focus, so you have to click into it once or hit Home to give the new folder contents focus so keyboard navigation works.

- The arrow down key in the dash doesn't work anymore. Instead of going down and allowing me to select the icon I want to start the cursor stays in the search box. I really liked using a combination of keywords and arrow keys to find my program. For example to start synaptic I wold enter 'syn' in the dash and the go down once and to the twice to the right to select synaptic and enter to start it. Now I'm forced to give the icon area focus to select the proper icon first.

- Totem stopped playing Quicktime videos, but VLC works. Totem tries finding plugins and installing them, but it always says it couldn't find any plugins or the plugins are already installed. This is a pure configuration issue with the old config prior to the upgrade. Bug #856988 describes a workaround, which worked fine for me:

$ rm .gstreamer-0.10;gst-inspect

That's it so far. Other problems will follow.

I'm on an Everyman 4.5 sleep cycle since over a month now, only sleeping a total of 5.5 hrs within every 24 hr period. Often it's quite hard to stick to the schedule and I move, skip and retake naps, sometimes I just start napping when I feel tired. Just like yesterday where I went sailing and my nap time fell right in the middle of a 6 hr sailing trip when I was in charge of the spinnaker of a 30 ft yacht going over 7 kts (If you don't understand what I'm saying here: I was carrying quite some responsibility). Anyway, I moved my nap by 4 hrs, getting really tired at my normal nap time, having a hard time to stay awake and focused. In the evening I went swimming and to the sauna with my family, right during my evening nap time. I was so exhausted, I went about 4 hrs early to bed and slept a whole 6 hrs istead of 4.5 hrs. So this morning my schedule was still messed up. Got up 5:30 am instead of 7 am and was tired at 10 am already instead of my usual 1 pm nap time. Then I took a second nap at 2 pm.

And I had an awesome lucid dream! Lucid dreaming means I was aware that I was dreaming. There are tons of different kinds of lucid dreams, which is why I explain a little more what my dream was like. Check out wikipedia for an idea what a lucid dream is. According to other sleephacker's reports lucid dreaming is a side effect of polyphasic sleeping kicking in sooner or later (i.e. Steve Pavlina).

Right now I have contractors in my house, using loud tools, talking etc. and I was afraid I wouldn't even be able to fall asleep, but shortly after I laid down I realized I was in a room which I didn't know but recognized as home. I opened the front door and saw dirty, brown water standing right up to the upper corner of the last step, filling the whole hallway of what seems like a house with multiple flats. A window was open and the water was running out there, preventing the water from raising high enough to get into my flat. That moment I knew I was dreaming: I don't live in a high water area. So I started to test out and control my dream.

Moving was quite easy, I could move swiftly around, not being held back by the water, it even seemed I was walking on the water. Tight spaces were no problem and I could squeeze through the rather small window easily. Later, when I tried to walk up a weird road going straight up a mountain I noticed I couldn't do that. Gravitiy was pulling me down and my feet wouldn't stick to the wall. I could've tried climbing up there, but rather tried other things.

I noticed I didn't feel the water or any other environmental influences, didn't feel wet or cold, but comfortable all the time.

Altering the environment was only possible in the way physics work. I could open doors, touch walls, walk on the ground, break things, move them etc., but I wasn't able i.e. changing the slope of the road going straight up a mountain. This contradicts a little the fact I was able to kind of walk on the water in the beginning. When I realized I couldn't shape the world how I liked it, I tried to get to places I like.

So I kind of teleported myself to different worlds. This worked by turning around a corner or turning around myself, so the place I was at was out of sight for a moment and when I turned back to it it was a different place, or simply going around a house corner and behind there was the middle of a deep forest. I moved to several places but didn't come up with good ideas where to go to or what to do.

Thinking of and letting people appear did not work at all. I tried to think of a couple of people I like to spend my time with and tried to make them appear. No chance. I was alone in this dream the whole time.

Time felt endless. I remember waking up several times before starting to dream because of the contractor's noises. But the again I woke up about 2 minutes before my alarm went off. I guess I had a net dream time of maybe 17 minutes. But the dream felt so long and since I was aware that I'm dreaming and have contractors downstairs, potentially having questions to ask, I started mixing this into my dream. This is where it went downhill.

I got into a state where I thought I was getting up because the contractors were coming up the wooden stairs and I could here their heavy boots. I thought I heard them trying to ask me something but couldn't make out the words, so I tried to wake up to answer that question, but I just couldn't. I turned around in my bed and suddenly was in a bunk of a boat, looking at it's wooden ship's side. Oops, I didn't mean to go there, but I guess I lost focus when I got stressed out about not being able to wake up. Then I saw two contractors coming into my room. One sitting down on my chair, pulling out the power of my computer while it was on (nooo!!!) and saying that he needed something and got it now. The second contractor was talking to me, but again I couldn't make out his words. It seemed to me as if he was asking permission to do things differently than discussed with my mom and divert from the plan. I couldn't allow that and tried to wake up again.
This time it seemed to work and I got up. I was alone in my room and checked on my computer which was untouched. But my chair was missing. Maybe that's what one of the contractors was looking for. I feared they would ruin it with their dirty clothes and I'm not sure what happened right there, but I didn't check for my chair or the contractors. For some reason I must've realized that I was still dreaming. I was wondering how much time passed already and if the contractors left already, making fun about the guy who couldn't wake up anymore. I was sure I spent an hour or more sleeping and dreaming, letting the contractors wait. Then somehow, I managed to finally wake up.

My alarm clock was showing exactly 1 minute when I got up. I was amazed when realizing how little time really passed and what a fascinating dream I head. Although the end of it I panicked a little and was uncomfortable, I decided to get more into lucid dreaming and maybe I can take better control of them in the future.

Lately people were telling me I look tired quite often. Indeed, during the day I experience periods where feel tired and have a hard time to stay awake. On the other hand I had trouble falling asleep for my naps and often reset my alarm and in the end gave up. Usually I get a nap sometime after my regular nap time when I feel tired enough, but still then it often takes a long while for me to fall asleep.
Today the contractors wouldn't arrive before noon and I had no apparent reason to get out of bed early, so I fell asleep again. For another 4 hrs. Totals to about 8.5 hrs of sleep this night. Feels to me as if I slept the better part of the day. Seems like I was sleep deprivated and really needed the sleep. Feeling well rested but am having a bad conscious now. Hopefully those crashs don't hinder my adjustment to the schedule which I was actually hoping to have finished by now.

Guest Blogger about 28-Hour-Day

Yoo is going to try to sleep by the 28-Hour-Day and tell us about his expeirences on my blog. To learn exactly what this is and how it works out for him read his first post to be expected in this place tomorrow