new tutorial: android SDK on your ubuntu 12.04 system

[Avi Greenbury]

Bas Roufs wrote:
> Hello Robert and Everybody,
> I am happy to experiment along the lines of your tutorial - with a
> view to sharing my findings. I work at present with Kubuntu 12.04, at
> two 32 bits computers.
> One question for now: is it possible to use *Ubuntu to "root" and
> "flash" an Android phone? 

All I've ever used to flash Android devices is Linux machines and ADB,
so it's certainly possible. You *may* need a Windows machine to run
some peculiar unlocking software, but this is dependant on and
relatively specific to the device. Your best bet is likely somewhere
more aimed at supporting the reflashing of that device than a generic
Ubuntu mailing list; we *may* have someone who has flashed a Lenov
a75 from Ubuntu before, but you're more likely to find one of them on
a list full of people who've flashed Lenovo a75s from various devices.

The general process, as far as I've seen (on HTC and Samsung devices)
is to:
 - unlock the boot loader where necessary
 - copy update.zip to the root of the fs
 - boot into a 'recovery' mode
 - install the update package

it's the first step that may be prohibitively complex to do under
Linux - it's likely not something Lenovo have made public, and so
you're restricted to whatever tools have been produced by whoever
managed to reverse-engineer a fix for it. Once you're beyond there and
can use either ADB or the device itself it doesn't much matter which
OS you're using. This is, also, at a point prior to Anrdoid (it's
roughly equivalent to getting past a BIOS or GRUB password before
being able to boot off a CD to install an OS on a PC).

-- 
Avi