Help OS update on GNU/Linux (without NPS/Odin)

[b4u]

Hello,

I'm looking for a way to update the Galaxy without using NPS or Odin (which both don't have a GNU/Linux build).

So I've downloaded the official I5 update (thanks to sephail I think), and here it is after unzipping then extracting the tarball:

amss
cache.img
kernel
recovery
system

Is it feasable to repack this to an update.zip file and apply it via the recovery menu?
If it is indeed safe to try this, could someone please point me to some documentation describing the "update.zip" file format so I could try digging into this a bit more (couldn't find much about it, except that the archive needs to be signed)?

Thanks

 

[kam187]

You can probably use fastboot to flash each partition. eg.

fastboot flash recovery recovery

See here:

http://andblogs.net/fastboot/

Kernel should be 'boot' and amss should be available in the new fastboot as a partition name. The rest are in the url above.

 

[b4u]

Hi kam187,

It seems fastboot doesn't work well with large image files (haven't looked at the source code though) but here is what I get if I try to flash the I5 'system' image:

$ ./fastboot flash system ../workspace/system
sending 'system' (88324 KB)... FAILED (remote: data too large)

Same error if I use a 'system' generated from a nandroid backup (which I know is a valid one) :/

Also, anyone knows what is amss used for?
It's the only file in the archive which is not an image file:

$ file amss 
amss: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1, statically linked, corrupted section header size

but for some reason It exists only in the firmware update, I can't find it on the phone...

 

[kam187]

AMSS is the baseband firmware afaik. I'm not 100% but i think it gets run from the ramdisk to update the radio firmware. The update.zip mechanism doesnt flash the radio firmware, so they usually use a script in /system to do it on first boot.

If fastboot isnt working to flash the partitions then I guess you're only other option is to extract the system partition and make a update.zip

 

[ressu]

you might want to talk to paul from modaco, who has built a custom ROM for i7500. He did it by extracting the original images and then copying them to the filesystem. Which is clever in a way, but makes tracking new releases tedious.

21/09 1.1 - the MoDaCo Custom ROM is here (rooted with custom Kernel with swap/netfilter + more&#33 - Android @ MoDaCo

I've also considered building a system to convert a .tar package in to an update.zip, but never seem to be able to find the time to do it.

 

[pegasus21]

Converting it to an ota update is simple the problem is how to flash the baseband. It's not on one of the partitions that fastboot can access.

 

[ressu]

Converting it to an ota update is simple the problem is how to flash the baseband. It's not on one of the partitions that fastboot can access.

There is a command to flash the baseband, but it hasn't been proven to work. The same command is used on the various HTC models to flash the baseband.