sábado, 19 de mayo de 2012

Rooting my Android device for the first time

I'm getting ready for the next cyanogenmod stable release, so today I started by rooting my device (a ZTE Blade Gen 2) and then installing clockmod recovery, being a newbie on this made me notice a few items missing on the docs, let's go over them...
First thing was to install the Android SDK to be able to run adb, I only had to install openjdk-6-jdk for this, I followed Cyanogenmod's guide and what it didn't say there is that adb doesn't come on the starter package anymore, you have to run android on the tools directory and there select to install the android sdk platform-tools, that way you'll end up with adb on the platform-tools directory.
Of course that to be able to run adb's ELF 32-bit LSB executable on my Debian 64 bits installation I had to do a few things but luckily being running Debian Wheezy with its multiarch superpowers it took me just a dpkg --add-architecture i386 ; apt-get update ; apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
Once I had the adb installed and running (Debian's multiarch rules) I found that adb was giving this message: "error: device not found". It turned out that I had to turn on "USB Debugging" on my device (Settings > Applications > Development > enable USB debugging) and then give plugdev group permisions to write to the device using this udev rule:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="19d2", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
Then I just followed Cyanogenmod's root and recovery howto and it went like a charm.
I know have the blade ready for the last step, where I plan to follow Cyanogenmod's flashing instructions to be able to install the new stable version (which should be out when it is ready, in a Debian style).
Just one more thing, to boot into the ClockworkMod Recovery you have to hold for some time volume down while you power the phone on.
/me feels much like the good old days starting with Linux following other guy's howtos with just a little knowledge of what one was doing.