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Softpedia reports
The tool is developed by Marius Quabeck [of UbuntuFun.de] and is called magic-device-tool. The first stable version, magic-device-tool 1.0, is now available to everyone and promises to offer a simple and easy-to-use batch tool for installing Canonical's Ubuntu Touch mobile OS, as well as Android, Cyanogenmod, or Phoenix OS.
In other words, you'll be able to replace your mobile operating system on your device with any of the following: the latest Ubuntu Touch release, Cyanogenmod--with or without the GAPPS (Google Apps) package, the factory Android image, as well as Phoenix OS. Please note that you'll only be able to run one of these OSes on your mobile devices [at a time].
[It] has been successfully tested with BQ Aquaris E4.5, BQ Aquaris E5 HD, BQ Aquaris M10 HD, BQ Aquaris M10 FHD, Meizu MX 4, Meizu Pro 5, LG Nexus 4, LG Nexus 5, Asus Nexus 7 2013 WiFi, Asus Nexus 7 2013 LTE, Asus Nexus 7 2012 3G, Samsung Nexus 10, OnePlus One, and Fairphone 2 (FP2).
magic-device-tool is also good for creating backups, restoring your device, locking or unlocking the bootloader, and installing TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project) recovery.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:53PM
While this is cool, what is really needed is support for more recent devices.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:12PM
More devices in general.
Maybe the recently disclosed exploit that uses rowhammer to root practically all android phones will help?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:50PM
Maybe this will convince the networks to get phones patched faster.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:05PM
It is nearly impossible to fix rowhammer in software. If the SoC has memory encryption then they might be able to turn it on, and that would probably mitigate rowhammer enough to make it infeasible. But turning on memory encryption may cause a lot of new bugs to fall out due to unexpected consequences, so its not something they can just send out in next week's patch.
And if the hardware does not support memory encryption, then they are pretty much SOL.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:06PM
It's an adb front-end shell-script with some git pull and apt-get invocations. If you want to add support to some other device, go to xda forum to see what foul brew of special steps your new-shinny needs, test them, fork the project, update the script, commit and push for a PR.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:21PM
Man is that XDA forum a shit show.
First the forum software itself is crap. Painful, tedious, barely fit for purpose crap.
And the people there are almost all self-taught hobbyists which means they have their own vocabulary that only rarely overlaps professional software development terminology (and sometimes even contradicts it). It reminds me a lot of reading the forums for mini-dish pirates. Everything they learned was empirical so they made up their own words to describe it. But if you have even a little professional experience with the technology it makes it even harder to figure out what the fuck they are talking about,.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:38PM
Terminology? I just assumed they're functionally illiterate.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:17PM
The same one here: https://github.com/MariusQuabeck/magic-device-tool/blob/master/devices/nexus4/android/factoryimage.sh [github.com] never worked for me.
I always had to decompress image-occam-lmy48t.zip and do a few things differently to circumvent no-space-left errors.
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(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:54AM
Thanks for this story. I have a Nexus 7 (2013) sitting around doing basically nothing and will give this a try to see if I can make it more useful than as a paperweight!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:08PM
Tool That Lets You Install Ubuntu Touch on Your Mobile Device Now Supports Maru [softpedia.com]
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