Mike Southby

The official HTC RUU files are only available for Windows, however if you are using either Linux or Mac OSX there is now a way to run a modified version of the RUU to enable you to update using the same official ROM, just read down through this guide and follow the instructions below.

Caveat: Please read the entire guide before starting and ensure that you fully understand all of the steps.  If you are unsure about anything, please ask a question using the comments at the bottom of the post before continuing; it’s better to check first before starting and finding you run into problems.  The usual also applies, by following this guide you do so at your own risk, I will not be held accountable for any problems you may encounter along the way.

Next, you’ll need to create your goldcard:

• Backup the data on your microSD card.  You may also wish to make a copy of any SMS or MMS messages that are already on your phone, suitable apps can be found on the market to do this.
• If you took out your microSD in the previous step, ensure it is back in your Desire and click through Menu>Settings>SD & Phone Storage.
• Click Unmount SD card.
• Click Format SD card; by doing this from within your phone instead of formatting it from your computer, you will ensure that it is formatted in the correct format.
• Next, download and install ASTRO File Manager from the market if you do not already have it installed.  Once it has finished being installed open the application.
• Navigate to sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:82d1 (you may find that ‘82d1’ will be different, this is normal just choose the option that you have available on your device).
• Long press on the CID file.
• Select Open As and then Text.
• Select File Editor.
• You’ll be given a long number, make a note of this somewhere safe.
• Open this page in your internet browser on your computer.
• Enter the number you found in the above steps into the SD Card Serial (CID) field.
• Enter all of the other details that you are asked for and hit Generate Goldcard.
• Check your email on your computer, the goldcard image that you have just created will have been sent to you as an attachment.  Save this into the root of your user directory, it’s important that you do not save it anywhere else.
• Connect your Desire to your computer.
• Pull down the notification bar on your Desire and press Charge Only (if you have previously changed the default option this may be different, i.e. HTC Sync).
• Select the Disk Drive option and hit Done.
• On your computer, open Terminal which can be found by clicking through Applications>Utilities>Terminal (depending on which operating system you are using the location of Terminal will vary)
• Type the following:
  diskutil list
• You should be able to see your microSD card; you can recognise it from its size and by the fact that its type is DOS_FAT_32.  You need to make a note of the Identifier for example disk2s1.
• Now you need to unmount the microSD, assuming your Identifier was disk2s1 (change the value ‘2’  based on the number you got after the word ‘disk’) enter the following:
  diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
• Finally, to actually create your goldcard type:
  sudo dd bs=512 if=~/goldcard.img of=/dev/disk2 (remembering to change the ‘2’ if appropriate)
• When prompted, you’ll need to enter your password.

That’s the goldcard created, and the hard work out of the way.  At this stage, double check that anything on your device that you wish backed up has been, as in the following stages you will flash your Desire with a new ROM and wipe any data in the process, then when ready proceed with the next stage:

• Extract the OpenRUU archive that you downloaded earlier.
• Run 2FastbootFlash-xxx.sh, where xxx represents the operating system that you are using; either Linux or Mac OSX (based on the Linux version, to run the file you will need to ensure that the file is executable.  To do this, right click the file and clicking through Properties>Permissions, tick to allow executing file as a program.  Then simply double click the file and choose Run in the popup allowing it to run within Terminal).

The RUU should now run and after a few minutes you will be finished.  Any questions leave a comment below.

Credits:  Thanks to 42turkeys for the tools and scripts used in this guide.

I’ve recently been using one of my machines in a dual-boot configuration running Windows 7 Ultimate alongside the latest Ubuntu LTS distribution, although decided that I wanted to revert it back into a dedicated Windows machine and ‘reclaim’ the disk space being utilised by Linux.

Of course there are a few ways of doing this; I’d normally only run a dual boot configuration on a test machine so wouldn’t be too perturbed by having to rebuild and start over, but this machine already had a lot of data and customisation and I didn’t want to start again and rebuild from the OS up.  So how else do you set about removing Linux and GRUB?  Well, the answer is actually quite simple.

Caveat:  I cannot stress the importance of ensuring you have a full backup of all the data on the machine before proceeding.  If you don’t have one, stop now.

Before going any further, you’ll need to dig out your original Windows 7 installation media as you’ll need this in the following steps, then once you are ready do the following:

• Restart your machine and enter the BIOS
• Somewhere in the BIOS menu you’ll find a setting to change the boot order of your machine, enter this and ensure that you have the DVD drive set at the top of the boot order
• Enter your Windows 7 DVD into the drive and restart
• Press any key on your keyboard when prompted to enter setup
• Select the appropriate language, time, currency and keyboard layout and click Next
• Click Repair your computer
• Click the option highlighting the operating system that you want to repair, in my case Windows 7 and then click Next
• On the following screen, System Recovery Options, click Command Prompt
• Once the command prompt opens on your screen type the following followed by Enter:
  Bootrec.exe /FixMbr
• You should now see ‘operation completed successfully’
• Restart your machine and enter the BIOS once again to change the boot order back to its original setting
• Now, restart your machine and you should notice that GRUB has been replaced with the stock windows boot loader and Windows starts to load without prompt
• Once back in the GUI, right click My Computer followed by Manage and Disk Management
• Right click the Linux partitions and remove them (simplified, you will have to click a few buttons here to acknowledge the steps)
• Right click the Windows partition and extend it into the space created by removing the Linux partitions (again simplified, just acknowledge the prompts as they appear)
• Job done

You should now find that GRUB and Linux are no more and you have a dedicated Windows machine once again, the whole process should take no more than around 5 minutes; far preferable to the hours it would have taken to rebuild the machine from scratch.

Note: the same method also applies for other distributions of Linux

At this stage I am assuming that you already have Sun VirtualBox installed and that you have gone through the process of installing a new virtual machine and installed Linux Mint 8 as a virtual machine.  It’s at this stage once you have started Linux Mint that you’ll be greeted with a low resolution screen, when you go to the display options you’ll find that you only get options to choose 800×600 or 640×400 which let’s face it, is not very helpful with modern screens.  Personally, I am running a 1920×1200 resolution so found the default resolutions almost unworkable.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to overcome this; all you need to do is follow the following steps:

• Start your virtual box and log into Linux Mint in the normal way
• Hit the right ctrl key so that you can get you mouse pointer outside of the virtual box as you’ll now need to work with the host machine
• Go to the top of the virtual window, click on Devices and then select Install Guest Additions.  You’ll now see the virtual CDROM installed within Linux Mint and a new icon will appear on the desktop
• Click back inside the virtual box again and go to Menu and then Terminal
• Type cd /media/cdrom0 and then hit enter
• Type sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run and then hit enter.
• You now need to reboot your virtual machine
• Log back into Linux Mint and go to Menu, Control Centre then Display.  You should now have more options than the original low resolution options you had.

Depending on your specific hardware, you may still find that you’d like a different combination or higher resolution than the new ones which are listed; again, there is a solution:

• Open Terminal again by going to Menu and then Terminal
• Type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then hit enter.  You will be asked for your password, type this and hit enter again
• The text editor will now load, before changing anything make a backup by going to the file menu and choose save as, changing the file name to xorgbak.conf
• Now to make the changes.  Unlike previous versions you will not see a long list of configuration options, 9.10 creates these settings dynamically.  However you can still add specific combinations so add your desired settings here (Caveat: Working with xorg.conf is a topic in itself so do not add code here unless you are sure what you are doing, you WILL break the installation and either have to fix it from the command line or reinstall the virtual machine), this will vary depending on your hardware and the resolution you are trying to achieve, I added the following lines of code for my hardware:
  Section “screen”
Identifier “screen0”
Device “Videocard0”
DefaultDepth 24
Subsection “Display”
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes “1920x1200” “1680x1050” “1280x1024” “1024x768”
EndSubSection
EndSection
• You must now do a save as but ensure you change the filename back to the original xorg.conf otherwise you will overwrite the backup you have just created.
• Restart the virtual box and you should now have the new screen resolutions available.

Enjoy.

Linux Mint 8 has available either ‘out of the box’ or from the repository, almost any software you could possibly imagine.  Just as with Ubuntu however there is one glaring omission (although we will let the development guys off as no doubt this is owing to legalities of licensing), and that is the ability to natively play a standard DVD.  This needn’t be a huge problem however as unlike when using a Microsoft OS, you do not need to purchase a codec to enable this feature, it just needs a few lines of code to be entered to acquire the needed codecs.

To play a DVD on Linux Mint, you will need to install libdvdcss2.  In Linux Mint 8 just as with previous versions and Ubuntu, there is no need to manually configure the repository, all you need do is the following:

• Open a Terminal Window (Menu > Terminal) and type the following:
  sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
• Next type the following:
  sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Once you have done that, next time you insert a DVD you should get the option to auto run with MPlayer Media Player.  Enjoy.

*Note:  The above proceedure is also the same to enable DVD playback in Ubuntu 9.10, although Terminal can be found in by clicking Menu > Applications > Accessories > Terminal*

As promised, an update on where I am at with trying to get a working installation of Microsoft Office 2010 on Ubuntu.

After numerous hours spent trying various options and configurations of WINE I’m still unable to get it working.  Sure, I can get it to install but it won’t run so I can’t really call it a success.  I’ll have some time over the Christmas break so will keep trying and hopefully will have a stable solution soon; these things have a habit of ‘falling into place’ and the answer is usually staring me in the face!

My original post showing how to install Office 2007 can be found here – http://www.mikesouthby.co.uk/2009/11/ubuntu-9-10-installing-microsoft-office-2007