[Replicant] Firmware

[Paul van der Vlis]

Hello,

I wanted wifi.

I found a howto to get firmware on the device [1] but I did not like it.
It did not give me enough control. I really don't want the firmware for
NFC, and I do not need bluetooth. I found a more manual way.

First I downloaded CyanogenMod. You can find images here:
https://download.cyanogenmod.org/
Strange that it's not possible to search for the "stable" type on that
site, but you can select your device type. I did choose the stable
version 10.1.3, without "signed" in the name (these versions don't have
root-access). Version 10.2.x is for Android 4.3, so that's to new for
Replicant what's using Android 4.2. See wikipedia for more info [3].

I downloaded CyanogenMod for my device, and found the firmware:
wget https://download.cyanogenmod.org/get/jenkins/42525/cm-10.1.3-maguro.zip
sha1sum cm-10.1.3-maguro.zip
mkdir tmp
unzip -d tmp cm-10.1.3-maguro.zip
cd tmp/system/vendor/firmware
ls

Then I copied only the firmware I wanted to the device. To let that
work, you have to enable USB-debugging and root-access on the device.
I copied this way:
adb root     # to get root access on the device
adb devices  # test if the device is ready
adb remount  # to get write access on the device
adb push bcm4330.hcd /system/vendor/firmware/bcm4330.hcd  # copy

This file is only an example, it's the firmware for bluetooth on my
device, I don't need that, but it's good for testing.

I could do everything as a normal user on my computer. The root access
is on the phone, not on the computer.

This way you can open a shell on the device and remove files,
e.g. files you used to test:
adb shell
rm /system/vendor/firmware/bcm4330.hcd
exit

I found out that on my device (Galaxy Nexus) not only the wifi drivers
where needed to get wifi working. I did also need the "ducati-m3.bin",
firmware for "Hardware media encoding/decoding". Not sure why.
For my phone, I found information about the firmware on [2], but you can
also find much information using Google.

For some firmware I had to reboot the phone before it worked.
Others did work directly (e.g. bluetooth).

With regards,
Paul van der Vlis.

[1]
http://code.paulk.fr/article16/missing-proprietary-firmwares-in-android-systems
[2]
http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GalaxyNexusI9250Firmwares
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanogenMod#CyanogenMod_10

-- 
Paul van der Vlis Linux systeembeheer Groningen
https://www.vandervlis.nl/