ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Florian Will <florian.will@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey,

Please note that all of my Ubuntu Touch knowledge is a few months old
already, so parts of this mail might be out of date.


Am 01.05.2014 16:32, schrieb Adam Pigg:
> Where are the other parts of ubuntu downloaded from for installation,
> are they just .zip files to install from recovery?

They used to be flashable zip files (actually, just one zip file) called
the "ubuntu rootfs". I haven't used the flashable zip in a long time,
not sure if it still works, but I guess so:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-touch/daily-preinstalled/current/

If the ace has similar flash size specs compared to the vision, that
might be a problem. About half a year ago (?), the size of ubuntu's
rootfs from that zip file was pretty close to 100% of my /data size. I
guess it's even larger now.

To add insult to injury, there is bug 1145984: The zip file contains a
.tar.gz file which is extracted to /data first, then the .tar.gz is
extracted to /data as well, then the .tar.gz is removed. Obviously that
won't work with our low-spec devices with smallish /data, but there is
some free space on /data after flashing (because the .tar.gz was
removed). So you might think that everything worked fine, when in fact
the .tar.gz extraction failed badly and most of the rootfs files are
missing.

You might want to repartition the SD card and mount /data from there,
that way I managed to get system-image (see below) working. I also had
to mount /cache from the SD card though. Or maybe you can modify the
flash script to unpack the .tar.gz file to /mnt/sdcard instead of /data,
I have a modification like that in my rootfs-modifier repo on github.
You might also want to manually remove stuff from the .tar.gz so the
files fit onto your /data partition.


The modern way of installing the rootfs and device-specific tarball is
through the system-image mechanism that also provides OTA updates (which
are mostly broken sometimes on devices with low RAM unless bug 1271684
was fixed in ubuntu system image). It requires that you repack your zip
using some new tools that I haven't tried yet (I played with
system-image before the community-friendly system image server was
introduced). For system-image you'll need the ubuntu-specific recovery
that was probably built alongside your device-specific 27MB zip file
(recovery.img). The recovery GUI fails to work correctly on the vision,
but the automatic flash process still works fine.

Have fun!
Florian