General

State of things

Booting to the Unity 8 shell works using flipped containers (i.e. booting into Ubuntu directly, then spawning an android container, instead of the old way of booting into android, then starting an Ubuntu chroot).

This port is entirely based on the work of the Andromadus team. They maintain an inofficial CyanogenMod port for the Desire Z. If a feature is marked as "Perfect" that means that it works without patches for Ubuntu, but still possibly a lot of patches for Andromadus.

Installation

Make sure that you know how to boot into recovery and how to use adb before you try this, as things can go wrong and you will need that knowledge to make your device work again. You can use the phablet-flash utility to flash your device. It is important to use the --wipe parameter that will remove any existing userdata from /data and /cache. Chances are your device will fail to boot (black screen, no ADB, only recovery working) if you forget to wipe. Use this command: phablet-flash community --wipe -d vision

Manual installation is possible, too:

• Put the most recently published files on your SD card (download from google drive link above):

  • cm-10.1-[DATE]-UNOFFICIAL-vision.zip

  • modified-saucy-touch-armhf-[DATE].zip

• Wipe/format data (this is important, even when just updating to a newer *-touch-armhf-*.zip!) and possibly system partitions.
• Flash both zip files through recovery, the cm zip first, then the touch-armhf zip.
• Reboot, read "known issues" below

Changelog (for vision specific things only!)

• 2013-09-26: (cm: 20130924, ubuntu: 20130923)

  • Fix mtp (PC <-> Phone file transfer via USB), though currently this breaks adb

  • Fix auto brightness
  • Some work on making audio work again after Ubuntu switched from audioflinger to pulseaudio
  • Fix mounts
• 2013-08-25:
  • Fixed click packages confinement (i.e. stock ticker, sudoku, dropping letters fixed)
  • Some kernel changes (upgraded to latest 3.0.x kernel, ported LCD backlight driver to make it ubuntu compatible)

Known issues

• The first boot takes very long, more than 4 minutes. There is no boot animation. The screen might turn off before the GUI comes up and you have to re-enable the screen using the trackpad or the power button after a few minutes to see the GUI. Subsequent boots are somewhat faster but still slow.
• As of 2013-09-26, wifi fails to work on some boots. Reboot (possibly repeatedly) until it works.
• As of 2013-09-26, ADB and MTP (usb file transfer) appear to be mutually exclusive and either ADB or MTP randomly fails after boot. ADB fails to work most of the time. If you need ADB, open the terminal app in Ubuntu and type "sudo restart android-tools-adbd", then enter "phablet" at the password prompt. Note that in order for phablet-flash to work, ADB must be active, so make sure it is (or start phablet-flash when your phone is booted into recovery, which should always work).
• As of 2013-09-26, the phone appears to do some heavy lifting in the background from time to time (hud-service and/or unity8 taking a lot of CPU time). When this happens, the GUI is unresponsive and you can't, for example, unlock your phone. Wait a minute or two and it should work again.
• When /data has more than a few MB used and phablet-flash is used without --wipe, phablet-flash won't show any error messages, but flashing and rebooting into Ubuntu fails (since only 1 out of 2 zip files flashed correctly). Always use --wipe. When manually flashing the ubuntu zip file, there is an error message if /data must be wiped.
• Video playback doesn't work
• camera doesn't work and seems unlikely to work in the future

The image

How to build it

• Use my github repo linked above to init the source tree using the repo tool (branch "master").
• You might need to fetch one or more bzr branches (platform api?), follow directions as published by Ubuntu
• ". build/envsetup.sh" in the the source tree root
• "brunch cm_vision-eng" in the the source tree root
• The android zip file will be created in out/target/product/vision (cm-*.zip)

• Download Ubuntu rootfs from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-touch/daily-preinstalled/ and use the rootfs modifier script linked above (github) to make it work for the Desire Z. (see instructions on github)

Redistributability

The Image contains blobs from https://github.com/Andromadus/proprietary_htc_vision with unknown redistributability status.