Daniel Holbach: Want to try Ubuntu Touch on your phone? We’re almost there!

In the last weeks I blogged a couple of times about how we want to get Ubuntu out to more and more users in a much much easier way. It would be great if we could have gotten all images built in the data centre, but unfortunately do redistributability issues (some firmwares, blobs and proprietary kernel modules) not allow us to redistribute them easily.
Another issue were some short-comings in our infrastructure, which have to some degree been fixed already.

Anyway… we wanted to make it easier and take sort of a short-cut, so the unstoppable Sergio Schvezov sat down and restructured phablet-tools to let us much more easily support community ports of Ubuntu Touch.

What does this mean?

Up until now, phablet-flash just supported these four devices: Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. That was it.

After some discussions with port maintainers around the globe, we are quite happy to announce that we are now adding the following community ports to the mix: HTC Desire Z, Samsung Galaxy S2, Huawei Ascend P1. Now the family of phablet-flash‘able devices would look like this:

Once Sergio’s branch has landed, you will be able to just run
phablet-flash community --device u9200

to flash your device. (The above would be what you’d need to type in for a Huawei Ascend P1.) Until then you can just bzr branch lp:~sergiusens/phablet-tools/flash_change and run it from there.

More and more devices are on the way, and the process for telling phablet-flash about your port is actually quite easy.

You can help!

If you have any of the devices listed on our Touch Devices list, and you made a backup of things and you generally know your way around in terms of flashing, etc. Do the following:

1. Check if your port is registered already. If yes, great.
   If not, please talk to the port maintainers listed on the page linked from our devices list and follow the instructions for registering the port.
2. bzr branch lp:~sergiusens/phablet-tools/flash_change
cd flash_change
./phablet-flash community --device <vendor> (ie, i9100)
3. Give feedback on the ubuntu-phone mailing list.