Rant of the day.

[trekkiedane]

I'm a bit angry right now and thought: maybe other T-BBS'ers also feel the way I do from time to time, so here's a thread for that sort.


The thing that brought it on:

A couple of days ago I bricked my phone. Well, sorta: I froze it in a boot-loop, where it boots quite like normal but before getting to a point where I can interact with it it re-boots and re-boots and re-boots and re-boots...

Sure, I brought it on myself (that's what you get for fiddling around with apps that are still in development ) and I know precisely what I did to get here.

Never having actually bricked the device before I had to go look up how to flash the rootfs.

Rootfs is the filesystem that the root directory (also called ‘/’) is on. The N900 has a 256 MB OneNAND chip that is used for the rootfs, bootloader and kernel, together with a (slower) 32 GB eMMC flash that is partitioned as 768 MB swap space, 2 GB /home and 27 GB

This should be easy enough, I thought after reading about how it's done, and got started...

Right, easy isn't the word I should have used as I got some weird error-messages as a result -and had to go back to the forums to find out what those meant.

AH! -I'd been using the wrong flasher -no problem, just install the right one and do over, right?

Yeah, well, not exactly; that only gave me another weird error-message in the command-line window where I controlled the flasher:

Suitable USB-device not found, waiting.

Hmm, other people are bound to have gotten that before I did; back to the forum to look up that error-message...

Took me a while -looking through solutions until I found one that was for the Windows version on my PC.

Still got the same error. Back to the forum.

AHA! -it doesn't work when your device is connected to your PC through an USB-hub!

BUT: my frakking Acer PC has a lot of USB-ports and I have no idea which of them are actually connected to internal hubs.

Turns out: all of them!


I am now at a point where I've decided to go pay a guy in a phone-store to do it for me come Monday.

 

[RevdKathy]

I have sent you links for a maemo expert very willing to help you and support, if that's any good.

 

[trekkiedane]

^Thanks! -a lot!

I might just try your network after dinner, which I'm making now.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

It's posts like this that make me wonder if they somehow booby-trap phones to make it near impossible to make them work like we want.

I've been wanting to root mine for the purpose of controlling the running apps and getting rid of some that otherwise wouldn't be able to be uninstalled. Like "services" in Windows.

 

[DonIago]

I've had close to zero issues rooting my Droid X and now Droid RAZR MAXX. That includes installing new ROMs on the DX and upgrading the RM to ICS.

 

[trekkiedane]

It's posts like this that make me wonder if they somehow booby-trap phones to make it near impossible to make them work like we want.

I'm sure they do, only not this particular device, it was the ultimate hackable smartphone. The problem I got was, as I said, my own fault AND my current problem is due to all USB-ports on my PC being internal hubs

 

[rhubarbodendron]

My heartfealt commiserations, trekkiedane!
It was surely not your intention and it's propably mean of me to mention it, but this thread did make me feel so much better (which is precicely what one needs on a Monday!) because I never have such problems, deliberately using a phone that can text and phone and nothing else (because for everything else there are cameras and computers).

 

[trekkiedane]

My heartfealt commiserations, trekkiedane!
It was surely not your intention and it's propably mean of me to mention it, but this thread did make me feel so much better (which is precicely what one needs on a Monday!) because I never have such problems, deliberately using a phone that can text and phone and nothing else (because for everything else there are cameras and computers).

All cool!

The thing is that I'd probably have a mobile phone that could only text and a land-line at home -for talking with people (which I happen to HATE)- if it weren't for the fact that I like having the internet in my pocket when I'm not home, and the amount of devices I'd be carrying around would be staggering if they weren't build into one -Come to think of it... I did carry around a staggering amount of devices and thingamagoos back before I had a state of the art phone!

 

[DonIago]

Indeed, I initially got into the world of smartphones only because I'd had a Palm and a cellphone once upon a time and liked having the ability to update my LJ from work by tethering my Palm to my phone (using a keyboard dock). Eventually it made no sense to have them as separate devices. The keyboard dock was replaced by a laptop at some point.

I still use an iPod for my music though. I like having all of my music available at all times, and I'm not keen on having my phone trying to handle music and anything else I might want to use it for.

 

[trekkiedane]

^But with a smartphone you can leave all your music at home and stream it from there to anywhere you are

(Same for video -but that requires a seriously better 'plan').

 

[DonIago]

^But with a smartphone you can leave all your music at home and stream it from there to anywhere you are

(Same for video -but that requires a seriously better 'plan').

I don't think my smartphone's battery would appreciate that after 8 hours...

 

[trekkiedane]

^But with a smartphone you can leave all your music at home and stream it from there to anywhere you are

(Same for video -but that requires a seriously better 'plan').

I don't think my smartphone's battery would appreciate that after 8 hours...

Yeah, the battery-thing definitely is the Achilles' heel of the whole smartphone tech -I tend to carry a small battery-pack with a phone-charger when I know I'm not getting close to real power during my time away from home

 

[Gary7]

I feel your pain, TrekkieDane. I momentarily bricked a Motorola phone once when I was mucking around with seem (firmware) replacements. Thankfully, I found out a trick to completely reload the original seem and get back to normal.

I'm preparing to do a ROM replacement on my Android phone, and waited until really good reliable custom ROM's were available and the process became well documented with many testimonies of success. But I do realize it could manage to go wrong somehow and so I'm prepared to upgrade the phone anyway.

But yeah... the unexpected. Who'd have imagined that software would recognize USB ports differently, based on whether it's direct or via an internal hub? That's just friggin' bizarre. Why should it matter? Perhaps there's something up with the drivers in use on the PC that's allowing for a difference to be perceptible. As I see it, tbere should be an abstraction layer below the software so that all USB ports are treated equally.

Anyway... good luck with the troubleshooting. I hope you get it figured out without too much more pain.

 

[Captain Ice]

I feel your pain, td. Part of the reason i bought the phone I did was that it didn't come with much of any bloatware. At the time, it also happened to be the only phone running ICS as it's OEM OS.

 

[trekkiedane]

^Oh, I got rid of the bloatware as one of the first things I did with the device -no problem as it almost entirely consisted of links to different Nokia-services.

I feel your pain, TrekkieDane. I momentarily bricked a Motorola phone once when I was mucking around with seem (firmware) replacements. Thankfully, I found out a trick to completely reload the original seem and get back to normal.

I've done something like that a couple of times, but never when the device was locked in a 'boot-loop'.

But yeah... the unexpected. Who'd have imagined that software would recognize USB ports differently, based on whether it's direct or via an internal hub? That's just friggin' bizarre.

'twas a bit of a surprise for me too

TIL ( ) my service-provider won't touch phones they haven't sold me (they never had this particular model!)
I also learned that the phone-repair shop around the corner only fix hardware-problems and i-stuff.
Tomorrow I'll try the unlock-shop in town... according to their web-site they specialise in the sort of thing I need done (and at reasonable prices even).

One big problem I've had during this smartphone hiatus of mine is that I've had to go home and look up where next to go and see if they could help me...Had I had the phone on me I could have visited all the possible service shops in town one after the other as I could have looked them up from the phone

 

[trekkiedane]

Apparently even the professionals thought it necessary to reset my phone to factory settings.



Oh well, only means I have a new gadget to play with -again

 

[rhubarbodendron]

did the professionals at least manage to rescue the data you saved (phone book, messages, pictures etc)?

 

[trekkiedane]

^Nope, and from how they described how they did it they actually tried to only 're-install the system' before giving up and doing it the hard way... I'm pretty sure I could have done it myself if I had had access to a 'puter that works in less unknowable ways than my own though... Oh well, maybe next time

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It's posts like this that make me wonder if they somehow booby-trap phones to make it near impossible to make them work like we want.

I've been wanting to root mine for the purpose of controlling the running apps and getting rid of some that otherwise wouldn't be able to be uninstalled. Like "services" in Windows.

There is a little bit of that, but non-iPhone smartphones aren't really "booby-trapped" to make them hard to mod. Rather, they are built to work under very specific, tested circumstances, and if you mess any of it up (such as by loading the wrong version firmware or driver somewhere along the way), the whole thing can go tits-up.

 

[trekkiedane]

^And apps can be found in a wide spectrum, from approved by the people who made the phone to I'm not sure if this'll work -it does on my device so it may not brick yours either...