Android 2.1

I've successfully upgraded my phone to 2.1! After my failed attempt last week I did some more research and found a blog post which suggested taking the battery out during the upgrade. The trick is to take the battery out when it gets stuck on step 3 "upgrading the firmware on the phone". It then tells you that there has been an error, and that you need to press Volume Down + Camera + Power. When you do this the phone displays a Blue SIM logo and a downloading status bar. You can then click back through steps 1 & 2, and when you get to step 3 it actually installs the update, only taking a minute or two. The phone then restarts and you have to re-associate it with you google account and wait for it to resync your contacts, mail, etc. This took a surprisingly long time, I'm not sure how long as I gave up and went to bed! If you had AppBrain installed then the next thing to do install that and use it to re-install your apps.

Trying to upgrade my Phone

Last year I bought a Samsung Galaxy Portal, which runs Android 1.5. I was fairly impressed, particurly with the Gmail contact sync as well as geeky things like geotagging photos, and latitude.

I had problems getting it to talk to my computer. After a bit of research I discovered that it will only talk to Samsung's "New PC Studio" if USB Debugging is turned on, and will only show up as a USB drive if it is turned off. When connected to Ubuntu it doesn't seem to matter.

Trying this with the version of "New PC Studio" showed that it recognised my phone but it wouldn't actually do anything with it. I wanted to upgrade my phone to a newer version of Android so I can play with some of the new features so I did some more research. After trying a couple of versions which people had suggested I found one which worked - 1.5.1.10064_2 (I actually installed 1.4.0 IL2 which upgraded itself), but you can download 1.5 from Samsung now). I tried updating the phone, but for some reason the phone rebooted during the upgrade and the upgrade didn't complete. PC Studio told me to press the volume down, power and camera buttons to do a restore, but this turned the phone on and everything seems fine. Now if I load PC Studio and go into the upgrade option it says I need to restore my phone, but since it's working fine I reluctant to do that. I'll come back to this another day.

Broken Ubuntu Packages

I was installing updates on my fit-pc when I accidentally killed the power, and ended up with some broken packages with Synaptic couldn't fix. I read the Package Manager Troubleshooting Procedure, but step 5 implied that this would get information about why it wasn't working rather than fixing the problem*, and I wanted to fix it.  I also wasn't entirely sure what all the commands did and I don't like running commands when I don't know the expected results.

I decided to look at the errors Synaptic gave when trying to fix the broken packages.  There were lots but the most interesting ones were things like this:

dpkg-deb: `/var/cache/apt/archives/libgomp1_4.4.1-4ubuntu9_i386.deb' is not a debian format archive

I did a bit of research and then downloaded packages manually, and copied them to /var/cache/apt/archives/ and this fixed the errors. There was one package I couldn't find so I just deleted that file, and hoped Synaptic would download it, which it did.  At this point I had no broken packages.

I then tried to install the rest of the updates and got similar errors. I was fed up with downloading packages manually so I deleted all the packages from /var/cache/apt/archives using the following command:

sudo apt-get clean

With hindsight that's what I should have done to start with.

I'm surprised that Synaptic doesn't handle this scenario so that non-techy people could resolve the problem without using the terminal.  Hopefully it does in a newer version.

*With hindsight I think it would have fixed the problem.