{"id":206,"date":"2011-10-31T23:00:40","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T22:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=206"},"modified":"2011-11-07T14:25:41","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T13:25:41","slug":"android-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=206","title":{"rendered":"Android Gingerbread (2.3) on Sony Ericsson Xperia X8"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Android\"<\/a>The other day, being a little bored, thoughts of getting a new phone came to me. Whenever this happens, a quick look at the price and sense returns. But that does not help with the boredom.<\/p>\n

Another thing that makes justifying a new phone hard is the, working perfectly well, Sony Ericsson Xperia™ X8<\/a> in my pocket. But that phone is no longer supported by Sony Ericsson and is therefore not going to be upgraded past Android™ 2.1. We will have to see what we can do about that!<\/p>\n

Not being a regular in the Android hacking world, this was a little bit of a poke in the dark. My first call was to CyanogenMod<\/a>. A number of time, I have heard people being very happy with it. I seems that work has been done to support the older Xperia models, but had not made it to an officially supported phone. A number of videos on YouTube<\/a> hinted that it was possible, so more effort was required.<\/p>\n

After spending one whole evening bouncing from one forum to the next, skim reading instructions here and there, I gave up for the night. My next attempt was a little more successful. As a reminder to myself, I am going to list the steps I took to get Android 2.3.7 working on my Sony Ericsson Xperia X8. This is not a recommendation to anybody to do the same. Some steps may be missing. Doing this could brick your phone. Proceed at your own risk! Don’t blame me. etc.<\/p>\n

\n
Get root<\/p>\n
The easiest way to do this is is with Super One Click<\/a>. There is sure to be a manual method of doing this, but this worked here. Well it did after installing the .NET stuff as mentioned.<\/p>\n
xRecovery<\/p>\n
Next, xRecovery<\/a> needs to be installed. My first attempt at this failed, but that was probably because the file permissions were not correct. A file manager that can make use of the root powers helps here. There is sure to be lots of options, but ES File Explorer<\/a> works just fine.<\/p>\n
Backup<\/p>\n
With xRecovery working, do a backup. Now, as long as xRecovery does not get hosed, we can always get back to a working phone.<\/p>\n
Anttek App Manager<\/a><\/p>\n
Now that we have root, and have backed up our system, we can use this tool to remove some of the bloat.<\/p>\n
GingerDX<\/a><\/p>\n
Now download a new ROM pack, stick it on the SD card, reboot into xRecovery and load the new ROM. When I first did this, all it would do was loop the boot screen a few times, then lock. It appears that a factory reset is required. Fortunatly, that can be done from xRecovery.\n<\/dl>\n

Now we have Android 2.3 working and an old phone is given a new lease of life.<\/p>\n

Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, being a little bored, thoughts of getting a new phone came to me. Whenever this happens, a quick look at the price and sense returns. But that does not help with the boredom. Another thing that makes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,5],"tags":[89,90,93,91,62,92],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":220,"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuphi.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}