Flashing a Nexus device with Ubuntu Touch from Mac OS X

Michael McCracken — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:40:00 GMT

I've been working with Ubuntu Touch recently, using VirtualBox to run Ubuntu Saucy as a guest on my Mac, and while it does work to connect to the device once it's installed, the process of reflashing is difficult. The manual steps on the Ubuntu Wiki Touch/Install page work for the old way, via phablet-flash cdimage-touch, with the caveat that you may have to manually reboot the device and/or re-connect the USB in between steps.

However, as of this email last week, the official way to flash phones is using the system images via phablet-flash ubuntu-system, which has a different set of files.

Instead of just muddling through and updating the manual instructions, I decided to see if phablet-flash would run natively on the Mac. After a bit of python dependency resolution, it does. Here's what I did:

Download the Android SDK tools. You only really need the "SDK Tools", not the whole ADT Bundle, so I clicked on "Use an existing IDE" at the bottom of that page, to get the smaller installer.
Unpack the archive and run ./android. Install the platform-tools (and nothing else).
Add the platform-tools/ directory to your $PATH for convenience.
(Optional) create a virtualenv for the python dependencies, and activate it.
pip install each of configobj pyxdg, and pyliblzma
get bazaar if you don't already have it.
branch phablet-tools: bzr branch lp:phablet-tools
cd phablet-tools && python setup.py build
At this point, phablet-flash ubuntu-system should work smoothly, with all transfers and reboots and timeouts going as expected.

The only minor hiccup is that it apparently doesn't get ~/Downloads/ from pyxdg, but it just means that you'll get the images saved to ~/phablet-flash instead of ~/Downloads/phablet-flash. No big deal.

michael-mccracken.net (nexus)

Flashing a Nexus device with Ubuntu Touch from Mac OS X