September 29, 2009

How to gain root in a HTC Hero (aka G2 Touch) phone

DISCLAIMER: I am not recommending you to root your phone and if you are not sure what for or what are the consequences of doing it (including your warranty), then don’t do it. This post is only an explanation on how to do it. Also I am not responsible for any damage to your phone, including bricking it.

First, download Android SDK 1.5 from here, unpack it and go to the tools/ directory.

My first problem:

./adb shell
error: device not found
./adb devices                        
List of devices attached                                                                  

Reading around I found out how to fix it, and then realized it was documented here

Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules with the following content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",ATTR{idProduct}=="0c02",SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",ATTR{idProduct}=="0c01",SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"

And restart udev by doing killall -HUP udevd, then unplug and plug the phone.

Now, get Recovery-RA-HERO-v1.2.2.img and fastboot (unpack and chmod +x this one), and put them somewhere, or as this example assumes, in the same tools/ directory.

Now boot the recovery image:

./adb shell reboot bootloader
./fastboot boot Recovery-RA-HERO-v1.2.2.img

You can use the NDroid Backup option to backup your phone to the SDCard.

Get Superuser.zip (requires registration in the xda-developers phorum) and unpack it. You will get two files from there: “Superuser.apk” and “su”.

./adb shell mount /system
./adb push su /system/bin/
./adb shell chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
./adb push Superuser.apk /system/app/
./adb shell reboot

Now confirm that it worked:

./adb shell
su

(Click Always allow on the phone)

And that is!.

If you need to restore your NDroid backup, I haven’t tried, but you can do it from the recovery image or manually pointing it to the images:

fastboot flash boot /boot.img
fastboot flash system /system.img
fastboot flash userdata /data.img
fastboot reboot
September 15, 2009

zypper: First download everything, then installl

Always wanted zypper or YaST (they share the ZYpp brain) or even your PackageKit compatible frontends to first download everything, give a look to the new commit policies that will be coming in 11.2. Note that zypper options to control them at runtime are not ready yet.

Also, if you need to access your repositories with nfs4, see this post Michael Andres just published.