Freedom and Privacy, Technology, Tutorial, Ubuntu

How to Flash from Cyanogen Mod to Ubuntu on Nexus 4

Normally in the past, it was very easy for me to flash from android to Ubuntu for phone.  I just used the usual ubuntu tutorial and it worked.

Then, somewhere in the middle I switched to Cyanogen mod (android) as the ‘lesser of two evils’ while I was waiting for bluetooth to improve.

I heard today that everything is working so I went back to flash and boom.  Snagged.  It woudn’t recognize adb devices when I was in fastboot mode.

I searched and tried a hundred commands but the answer turned out easy.  I just had to switch to recovery mode, not fastboot mode.

How you do that is on your green robot screen you just push the down arrow (volume) until the screen says ‘recovery mode’ at the top and then press the usual power button at the top right.

Then you go back and follow the install instructions from this command:

ubuntu-device-flash touch --channel=ubuntu-touch/stable/ubuntu

All good in the hood.


 

EDIT: All was NOT good in the hood.  I got stuck in a perpetual Cyanogen Mod recovery mode loop.  It turns out that nothing else worked for me.  The ubuntu flash process from the above command worked. I could see all the images going to the device. But it would continually reboot back into CM.

The solution?  Oddly, all I had to do was add back in the –bootstrap at the end of the command and everything worked instantly.  So the command looked like this:

ubuntu-device-flash touch --channel=ubuntu-touch/stable/ubuntu --bootstrap

I suspect this is not ideal because the official tutorial shows clearly you should only need the bootstrap option at first install only but mine always needs it.  If anyone knows what’s up it would be cool to know.  Please comment!  Otherwise, we’re back to Ubuntu – hopefully forever.

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