Vollkorn in Australien - technique

Flashing your Samsung Galaxy S III i9305 with Cyanogenmod 10.1 (on Linux)

nospam@example.com (Jan Girlich) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:41:11 +0100

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

Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot: Quirks

nospam@example.com (Jan Girlich) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:55:51 +0200

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.

TimeCorrection add-in for f-spot

nospam@example.com (Jan Girlich) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:38:01 +0200

This add-in for f-spot semi-automatically corrects your photos' time to UTC. This is great if you want to

- import pictures from multiple cameras and keep the order of time
- correlate your pictures with GPS data to add position information

The idea is to take a picture of the UTC time as a QR-Code and correct all photos by the difference between the UTC time encoded in the QR-Code and the camera's time encoded in the EXIF data.

If you run f-spot 8.1 check it out. I'd love to get some feedback. (Source: patch against stable-0.8 branch of f-spot)