Monthly Archives: July 2013

Introducing the Ubuntu Touch image based upgrader

Some of you may be aware that I along with Barry Warsaw and Ondrej Kubik have been working on image based upgrades for Ubuntu Touch.
This is going to be the official method to update any Ubuntu Touch devices. When using this system, the system will effectively be read-only with updates being downloaded over the air from a central server and applied in a consistent way across all devices.
Design details may be found at: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ImageBasedUpgrades

After several months of careful design and implementation, we are now ready to get more testers. We are producing daily images for our 4 usual devices, Galaxy Nexus (maguro), Nexus 4 (mako), Nexus 7 (grouper) and Nexus 10 (manta).
At this point, only those devices are supported. We’ll soon be working with the various ports to see how to get them running on the new system.

So what’s working at this point?

  • Daily delta images are generated and published to
    http://system-image.ubuntu.com
  • We have a command line client tool (system-image-cli), an update server and an upgrader sitting in the recovery partition
  • The images usually boot and work

What doesn’t work?

  • Installing apps as the system partition is read-only and we’re waiting for click packages to be fully implemented in our images
  • Data migration. We haven’t implemented any migration script from the current images to the new ones, so switching will wipe everything from your device
  • Possibly quite some more features I haven’t tested yet

So how can I help?

You can help us if:

  • You have one of the 4 supported devices
  • You don’t use that device for your everyday work
  • You don’t need to install any extra apps
  • You don’t care about losing all your existing data
  • You’re usually able to use adb/fastboot to recover from any problems that might happen

If you don’t fit all of the above criteria, please stick to the current flipped images.
If you think you’re able to help us and want to test those new images, then here’s how to switch to them:

  1. Get the latest version of phablet-tools (>= 0.15+13.10.20130720.1-0ubuntu1)
  2. Boot your device
  3. Backup anything you may want to keep as it’ll be wiped clean!!!
  4. Run: phablet-flash --ubuntu-bootstrap
  5. Wait for it to finish downloading and installing
  6. You’re done!
  7. To apply any further update, use: adb shell system-image-cli
    (never use phablet-flash after the initial flash, updates can only be applied through system-image-cli!)

Reverting to standard flipped images:

  • Boot your device
  • Backup anything you may want to keep as it’ll be wiped clean!!!
  • Run: phablet-flash –bootstrap
  • Wait for it to finish downloading and installing
  • You’re back to standard flipped images!

To report bugs, the easiest is to go to:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-image-image/+filebug

We also all hangout in #ubuntu-touch on irc.freenode.net

 

Posted in Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu Touch | Tagged | 11 Comments