About a year ago, I left my Nokia N900 phone to buy a Geeksphone device ( Peak ). This was hard, very hard… and it still is.
The phone I bought was a developper preview device, I couldn’t import contacts from my old device, I couldn’t check my personal calendars through it… But still, I wanted to be part of the FirefoxOS adventure.
Last stable update from Geeksphone was received on November 2013 and this situation began to really bothered me. Every bugs I experienced were solved and my apps weren’t updated either. Sometime I could even find nice apps wich were not compatible with my version of FirefoxOS.
So I put me fears aside and stepped into the flashing process to get a nightly build installed on my peak. Every step is simple, but if it goes wrong, I could lost all my contacts… Wich I entered by hand…
You can read the original version of these steps here.
First and Second steps are simple verification, have at least 50% of battery remaining and activate Remote debugging on the phone (go to Settings, Device Information, More Information, Developer and check on Remote Debugging).
Third step is for windows users only. Didn’t need it on my Debian.
You will then have to download a FirefoxOS image build for your phone. You can found those build in Geeksphone download pages. You can safely unzip it afterwards.
But wait a minute before running sixth step. You can found some piece of information out there, but nobody could clearly tell me if my data will be or won’t be lost.
First thing first, on Debian system, you’ll have to installed those package to run though next step :
- android-tools-adb
- android-tools-flashboot
Then, you will have to run adb as root. So plug your phone with USB cable and run :
# adb devices
It will start adb deamon and now can read throught your phone. You can then follow instruction to backup some data here (I didn’t need those)
If all goes well till now, you can safely do the last part. But I couldn’t run the flash.sh script given by Geeksphone because it don’t use adb and flashboot installed on my system.
So I edited the flash.sh script :
#!/bin/bash
adb reboot bootloader
fastboot flash boot boot.img
echo "Do you want to keep your user data ? (Some users has problems in first reboot, if you have, please reflash and select not to keep the data)"
select yn in "Yes" "No"; do
case $yn in
Yes ) break;;
No ) ./fastboot flash userdata userdata.img; break;;
esac
done
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot erase cache
fastboot reboot
Wait until your phone reboot and that’s it, you have the latest version of FirefoxOS :)
I’m using it every day and I really see how much progress FirefoxOS have made the last few month. To go further, I will rtry to build my own image of this OS and maybe I will have time to fix some bugs ;)