Screen flashing after upgrade

I finally got around to upgrading this (now old) machine from 16.04 -> 17.10 over the last couple days.  After fighting with DKMS it's finally booting and working... except the screen keeps flashing.

Why am I facing this reportedly fixed bug?

I managed to fix it by going into the NVidia X Server Settings and turning off this flag:

As soon as I unchecked that, everything was fine.

Ubuntu upgrade - left mouse click failure

I let Ubuntu upgrade to 16.04 today.  Afterwards, the mouse would move, right-click worked, and left-click worked in some apps. Most notably it did not work on the system menu/notification bar.  Doesn't even work on the login UI.

I knew this happened last time too, but couldn't remember why.  I finally figured it out.

In Firefox, go into Settings, turn off chat. Reboot (I know, shouldn't have to do that, but I had to).  Now,  mouse works.  Go back in and turn it back on, and it's still fine.

Upgrading the Galaxy Note to Jelly Bean

I received an SMS from AT&T today telling me that I could upgrade to JB using KIES. Enough acronyms for you?

Rebooting into Windows so that I could launch Kies....
Starting Kies, it detected that it was out of date and updated.
Afterwards, plugging in the phone, it detected the firmware was out of date and tried to update.
That's where things got redundant.  I got in an infinite loop that kept stopping at:

Now, don't get me wrong. My first thought was maybe I was down to 100MB internal storage again. I do tend to install a couple hundred apps.

But, now according to the file manager:

So what's going on?

After a few attempts, I went to Settings | Storage | Unmount SD Card

After that Kies was able to upgrade the device.

ia32-libs

Android is full of 32-bit tools and dependencies.
Running on x64 can be problematic unless you install ia32-libs.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu has been having issues installing it lately.

After 2 days, I finally found the solution here:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

After that, everything installs fine.

LMDE upgrade broke me

While not strictly an Android issue, I figured I would post this here since it it related to my previously mentioned build box.

Every time LMDE upgrades, it breaks my packages.  At the very least, it breaks the nvidia driver (I should probably switch to source-based) but this last time, it auto uninstalled almost everything NVidia/Gnome/X11/Mate/Cinnamon/etc.

You might be asking, "Why didn't you read the release notes that said to not upgrade yet?"

Well, to be honest, I was used to the simplicity of the daily non-breaking Ubuntu updates.  This new Debian tri-weekly breaking rolling update is a new beast to get used to. I put rolling update in italic because I don't understand how updating more packages less often is 'rolling'.

Anyways, I spent the last 3 days trying to fix my box.  It would boot fine - into a command line... but I really prefer to use Firefox/Chrome/Opera over links to do my web searching.

I am sure these instructions are not the correct way to do things.  You might even say it could be a bad idea to get into someones head.  But since that was the only thing I tried that allowed me to start booting into X again, here we go.

STEP 1:
First off, I determined something I thought should be installed.  I don't know what the process in my head is for that, other than just selecting some random names I thought out to be there.  For example 'gdm'.

STEP 2:
Secondly, I need to find out the correct name for it. IE: it's 'gdm3' not 'gdm'. For this, I did:

apt search gdm

and found the one that looked right (in this case 'gdm3').

STEP 3:
Then, I needed to know whether it was actually installed yet or not -- and at which revision. For that I did:

apt-cache policy gdm3

This showed that it was not currently installed!  Well that doesn't sound right.

STEP 4:
If step 3 showed the correct (updated) candidate:

apt install gdm3

If it fails to install, it might list some unmet dependency.  If so, I start over at STEP 3 (or STEP 2 if that doesn't work) using that dependency as the new name to test.

STEP 5:
If STEP 3 showed the wrong (or no) candidate, I looked at the numbers [priority] at the beginning of each URL.  It might show something like '500' for the one you want to install but '*** 700' for the one you have installed or it wants installed.  Look at the URL for the one with the higher unwanted priority.

STEP 6:
edit /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the URL from STEP 5

apt update

apt dist-upgrade

Go to STEP 3.


Like I said, these are probably not a good template to follow; however, next time instead of wasting 3 days trying to fix an upgrade I'll start here.

Upgrading NexusOne from 2.2.2 to 2.3.3

An old coworker, Scott Hooper, pointed out this site for me so I finally managed to get Gingerbread onto my N1 =) Yay me :)  Now let's hope it fixes some of those annoying issues (like the repeated need to pull the battery).

OTA FRF91

The other day, I got tired of waiting and manually upgraded my NexusOne to FRF83.  This morning I was greeted by an OTA update to FRF91.  I have not seen any changes (as of yet) but hear it has to do with GMail security.  Personally I am still waiting for the FM Transmit so that I can actually hear the handsfree on the car dock.

Manually installed FroYo

Ok, I got impatient.  I have been checking my System Updates window a few times a day, and still no sign of the update...  so I decided to do it manually using these instructions (recapped here):

*Note: These instructions are apparently for the unlocked TMobile version of the NexusOne (which I happen to be using on the AT&T network).

1. Verify that you are on build ERE27 (under Settings | About Phone)
2. Download this file as 'update.zip' in the root of your microSD (which I did via the USB connection)
3. Not sure if it is necessary, but I unplugged the USB for the next few steps
4. Power off your phone
5. Hold down the trackball and press/release the power button
6. When the white screen with skateboarding robots show up, make sure Bootloader is selected (should be already) and hit the power button.
7. If you try to scroll down (using Volume buttons) the screen may flash to another message for a moment. When it comes back, scroll down to Recovery and hit the power button.
8. After it reboots, you'll see the exclamation screen.
9. Press the power and volume up buttons.  I found PressPower->Press/Release Volume->Release Power seemed to work
10. Using the trackball, scroll down and select Apply sdcard:update.zip
11. It will take awhile, then reboots... then it takes a really long while. Go make a sandwich.
12. Once it is booted again, verify that FRF50 is installed.
13. In my case, it immediately started doing a synchronization.  If it does, I'd recommend waiting until it finishes.
14. Delete update.zip from the microSD
15. Put this file as 'update.zip' in the root of your microSD.
16. Repeat steps #3 through #10.
17. This time, after applying the update, you'll have to select the reboot option.
18. It's going to take awhile.  Go check your email.
19. Once it boots up, verify that FRF83 is installed.
20. Delete update.zip from the microSD.
21. Enjoy

MyActivity renamed

For anyone following the tutorials in this blog, you are used to the archetype creating MyActivity.java.  As I was writing up the tutorial for a multi-module android project, I realized that would cause conflicts when you have more than 1 project.  As such, I have changed the filename to ${artifactId}Activity.java...

So, if you created the project as such:

groupId: org.eoti.galatea

artifactId: SomeTest

Then the actual source file will now be:

SomeTest\src\main\java\org\eoti\galatea\SomeTestActivity.java

instead of

SomeTest\src\main\java\org\eoti\galatea\MyActivity.java

Hope that helps.

Upgrading the SD card

Step 1, I wanted to backup existing data on the current card. I turned off the phone, put the 1GB sd into the laptop, and copied all files to the computer. I popped the 16GB sd into the computer and copied the files back. Put the card into the phone and booted up. All works fine.

Next was to move some of the caches off the phone memory and put them into the sd. I followed these instructions to do that. Originally I was doing it from the Terminal Emulator, but running 'adb shell' was much easier.

Thinking about trying this to move the apps to the sdcard, but think I want to find an easier way...

Upgrading the ADP1 from the default 1.0 firmware to the official 1.1 firmware

I was planning on using my OpenSolaris box to do my Android development, but currently I don't have the time to try to port the SDK.  I didn't want to allocate permanent memory to a linux xVM, so instead of using Xen, I decided to use VirtualBox to run Linux to work on the Android development...  VirtualBox can not be run on a system booted into HVM mode, so that meant running Linux in VirtualBox on Windows instead.  Since my x64 machine has a habit of crashing whenever I plug in USB devices anymore, I decided to do it on my laptop.

Unfortunately, after getting the SDK and Eclipse (yuck) and the JDK installed - I couldn't get adb to work inside the VirtualBox version of Ubuntu.  I gave up on that for now and decided to update the phone via Windows.

I extracted the SDK and then put the fastboot binary (available here) into the tools subdirectory.
When you plug the device in, it will prompt you for drivers. They are in the usb_drivers/x86 subdirectory.

Here's the dos prompt portion of the instructions above... how to boot, fastboot, etc is covered in that doc.

C:\devel\Android>adb devices
HT846GZ39410 device

C:\devel\Android>adb push 1.1\ota-radio-1_22_14_11.zip /sdcard/update.zip
1155 KB/s (0 bytes in 9131603.007s)

C:\devel\Android>fastboot update 1.1\signed-dream_devphone-img-130444.zip
archive does not contain 'boot.sig'
archive does not contain 'recovery.sig'
archive does not contain 'system.sig'
< waiting for device >

Unfortunately, it never gets past that point. Trying to run 'adb devices' or 'fastboot devices' both show no devices.  Booting into the phone normally, adb works again.

The solution, unfortunately, is to replace the drivers again...




1. Boot device into fastboot, connect to PC
2. Navigate to Start > Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device
Manager > Universal Serial Bus Controllers
  a. Observe that there is a USB Mass Storage Device there
3. Right-click USB Mass Storage Device and select Uninstall
3b. unplug it and plug it back in
4. Windows then prompts with with New Hardware Found Wizard. Pointed
this to the USB driver included in the SDK

C:\devel\Android>fastboot devices
HT846GZ39410    fastboot

C:\devel\Android>fastboot update 1.1\signed-dream_devphone-img-130444.zip
archive does not contain 'boot.sig'
archive does not contain 'recovery.sig'
archive does not contain 'system.sig'
--------------------------------------------
Bootloader Version...: 0.95.3000
Baseband Version.....: 1.22.14.11
Serial Number........: HT846GZ39410
--------------------------------------------
checking product... OKAY
checking serialno... OKAY
checking version-baseband... OKAY
checking version-bootloader... OKAY
checking version-cpld... OKAY
sending 'boot' (1500 KB)... OKAY
writing 'boot'... OKAY
sending 'recovery' (1722 KB)... OKAY
writing 'recovery'... OKAY
sending 'system' (53645 KB)... OKAY
writing 'system'... OKAY
rebooting...

At this point, 'fastboot devices' and 'adb devices' both work...

Go into the Market app and install “Latitude Enabler for Root”.  Reboot.

[Official] Flashing your Android Dev Phone with a Factory System Image