Please mind that with freedom comes responsibility – if you can’t handle that, buy an iPhone where Apple will ensure that you cannot do anything harmful, or at least stay on standard distributions. The below text is only for those who embrace electronic freedom, and understand that liability shifted to you once you take this step.

Android and upgrades

Two mandatory reads on the subject:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397729,00.asp

http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support

However, we are a lucky bunch as there are MANY people involved in the process of bringing recent edition of the OS to orphaned hardware. Sadly the system itself is fairly locked and you need low level hackers opening it up, why the tools are quite often everything but user friendly. There are guides and forums (XDA Developers being the leading one). They often tell you HOW to do things but rarely why you do each step and often the steps are very general and you need to understand quite a lot in order to succeed in following the guides.

My aim in the below is to give you an X10 Mini guide that is a bit easier. Much of the text is based on the guides from XDA Developers, especially this one.

Key part – lots of what you do can go wrong, and the part which can go really wrong is that updating the phone system software is interrupted. You have then typically “bricked” the phone, rendering it to be a useless piece of weight. Please mind that with the X10 Mini this is not really possible. It’s always possible to get out of the loop which means that you can play along heavily and be fairly risk free.

This video shows in a really good way how you can do the work.

Having said this; I TAKE NO LIABILITY IF THIS GOES WRONG! You mess with your phone on YOUR risk, not mine!

Key presses you must know

Reset the X10 Mini: Press ON/Off and menu (the button on the top, and the “square symbol” button).

Enable flash mode: Turn off the mobile. Press “back” (left arrow) and insert the USB. Please mind that you are NOT requested to turn On the phone again. If this works, the led turns green and shine with a steady green light.

Enable flash mode from hung state: Press and hold the “back” button (arrow pointing left), and then press the reset combination (on/off + menu). Release the reset combination, while still holding the “back” button and insert the USB cable. If this works, the led turns green and shine with a steady green light.

Reboot into recovery: Custom recoveries are evoked by repeatedly pressing “back” during boot.

Software you might want to have

PC Companion or SEUS – Sony Ericsson’s own stuff. You need to have it installed (one of them -either will do) as it contain the proper USB drivers. PC Companion is a bit of bloatware, containing much more than you need. back in the old days you synced the handset to the PC, but today you should do that over the air and the USB connection should only be for fiddling and possibly leeching the pictures and pushing new music to the device. (SEUS is not really published in a visible way, so you need to knowwhere to find it. A suggestion is the site of an XDA user, seus.tk )

SuperOneClick – In order to gain “root” access you need a method. This is the solution for dummies and for the experts who know better than use commands and switches if a “point and click” solution is available.

Distributions and Kernal file – Many people evolved the android system in all sorts of different direction. Some are “original ones” and some are flavours of other editions. Some of them are based on the stock ROM but some require a revised ROM.  There is no way one can say that one is better than the other and it’s a matter of taste.

If you select a distribution that need a different kernel file,you also need these files:

S1Tool – Gives some information on the system.

MSM 7227 – Based on the information from ther S1 Tool, you use this package to adjust the bootloader so that you can flash using the FlasherTool

FlasherTool - This allows you to install ROMs to the phone – either the standard one, or a custom one. The flasher tool include something Gordons Gate drivers, which you also need.

Steps to do

1) Select a distribution.

The distribution I have picked is GingerDX. It’s based on a CyganoMod version of the system, and it’s fast and stable. Pretty much what you want from a system. This part is a total jungle though. Will require a lot of forum reading. This forum is where to go for input and suggestions and it’s well over what one would normally hope to see.

New version of GingerDX (021) requires a modified Kernel, called nAa (NAa stands for Nobody At All, which is a user of the XDA forum). A safe option might be to pick up the

Installing GingerDX itself is not that difficult – the hard part is the Kernel as it requires unlocking the bootloader.

2) Root the phone

The SuperOneClick program above does this. The mobile should have the on, fully booted and you allow remote debugging. A bit of visual guide here.

Run SuperOneClick as administrator on your PC. Press the “Root” button. That’s it. There are similar “one button” applications that work for other phones. Some run on the phone itself and some on the PC. It’s also possible to do it “manually” on the PC using the ADB shell interface, if you insist on doing something the hard way.

3) Mess with the bootloader (only needed if you should update the Kernel)

Admittingly, this is the hairy part.

The S1Tool is run to tell which of the CMD files in the MSM package you shall run.

# Download and install S1, FlashTools, MSM 7227 and Gordons Gate (as you installed the Flash Tools this is in the “drivers” folder of the installation).

3.1.a) Launch the S1 application

3.1.b) Press the “Do job” button (on the right)

3.1.c) Pick up your phone and enter Flash mode (see the “key presses” section above) and insert the USB stick. The program then picks up some relevant data. key part is the SEMC SIMLock certificate. If it’s there you are good to go. Please read the details on SIM lock and stuff here. (please mind – I’m not sure what it all means even if I am well aware what SIM lock is and how it works)

3.1.d) Close the S1 tool

3.2.a) Depack the ;SM 7227 package to a folder of your choice.

3.2.b) If you, as I, had SEMC SimLock certificate, feel free to run the “msm7227_semc.cmd” as administrator (right-click and select, run as administrator). Let it do it’s work and then your done.

3.3.a) Install the Flash tool

3.3.b) Download the kernel you wish to use. In my case the nAa 08 one. Place it in the “firmware” folder of the Flash Tool Installation.

3.3.c) Install and run the Flash tool.

3.3.d) Press the Flash button. The system will ask you to put the phone in flash mode, but you already know how to do that.

In case some part of my text is unclear, please read this and this.

3) Mess with the recovery (only if you didn’t mess with the Bootloader)

As with distributions, there are several to chose from. ClockWorkMod, xRevocery and so on. I picked the CWM for you as this is the easiest installer as there is a phone program to do it.

Use the Android market to download the “ROM Manager”; There are several ones but you should pick the one that looks like a cogwheel with a hat. From it, select to install ClockWorkMod.

Many videos and guides will show it; here.

Optionally pick the xRecovery, which there seem to be even more guides for; here and here for starters.

Third option is this, which is also an application run on the phone.

Please mind that all three options require that you have a rooted phone, as was the result of step 2) above.

4) Place the distribution on the SD card.

You can either copy the distribution to the SD when it’s in the phone or take it out and insert it it an SD reader directly to the PC. Please mind that you are to copy the ZIP and place it on the SD – do NOT unpack it, as the installer will do this. As stated above, I placed the GingerDX distribution on the SD.

5) Reboot the phone into recovery

When you have the recover menu on the screen, select “Install custom ZIP” or something similar.

When done, you are done!

Welcome to the new world of a free PhoneOS that lets you do what you want with it.

I had trouble with

# the screen not really fading up and

# WiFi issues – not finding networks that other handsets could see.

# Updating the Gmail client from Android market didn’t work – complains of problems in the package.

# Searches on market came up dry but the same program was suggested and installing it was fine (Endomondo)

Since I did quite few user additions to it, there was not much work lost by testing something else.

A few learnings was that this RemiX10 is possibly not the most stable release of the system so I just installed GingerDX. Let’s see how that behaves. Please note that this is version 005, and there is a version 006 but as I understand it only for the X8.

First experience – It allowed be to select a number of applications I would like to batch download. Nice. But I am on 3G data on my personal “lab” subscription without flatrate data. Not so nice. I had to interrupt and set WiFi.

1) Root the phone

This version of rooting worked well for me on http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803682

Do also allow it to install BusyBox – that is one of the options given during the progress.

2) Install Xrecovery

The version I found here worked for me http://maboot.com/how-to-install-and-use-xrecovery-on-xperia-x10i-for-back-up-restore-or-flash-new-roms/1851/

3) Install Remix

I found it here. The author is Italian, wrote his text in Italian and used Google translate to get it into english which you can tell from a text that quite often is pretty hard to understand.

The quick version of the key part is:

1) Download the Remix file – Use the mediafire link in the middle of the text. Please mind that there is a lite version but the guy basically says that it will cause you problems so I left it alone. Copy it to the SD card on a place

2) Start xrecovery and use the “Factory Reset” option (Once xrecovery is installed you launch it by pressing the back arrow repeatedly during a reboot, just when you see the “Sony Ericsson” white text on black background).

3) From xrecovery select “install custom zip” and select the Remix version you downloaded. Once it’s done, reboot the phone and let it boot to the system

4) Allow the system to perform the start-up configuration.

5) Reboot back and start Xrecovery using the back arrow again.

6) Selecte the fixes you wanted to install and reboot once your done.

You should now have a small little Gingerbread in your hand! Enjoy!

If you REALLY want to play around with the X10 Mini, you better start by rooting it. Rooting is gaining administrator access to the phone, removing all the restrictions it might have.

This is going to be very brief; Just visit this site and do what it says, and your done!

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803682

Great program, excellent post and also a fully role model step by step tutorial video.

As normal; this is hacking. Hacking is fun but hacking means that you can break things and pointing at someone else is not going to help. If you play the game, you might lost the match and I am not taking the blame for that.

Official site here

There is installation guide here

The actual image file of what is now refered to as the “Community Edition” is here.

Adding the extras-devel is made on the device, and installing the uboot package is also done on the device itself.

Not having a Linux machine handy (and also not feeling that comfortable with one either), I tried using Windows for the following steps.

The dd command is also available on Windows. Naturally not the native one, but a remake with the same syntax and functionality: I used the one you can find here

In order to fiddle with the format of the MicroSD, I used the free software Partition Wizard (this using a Sandisk micro adapter accessing the MicroSD via USB).

So, open the command shell in the directory where you have the DD command. Try “dd -list” to get a list of the devices attached to the machine. Mine was called “\\?\Device\HarddiskVolume21″. Please mind that getting this right is imperative. If you run the dd command pointing at the wrong device, you will logically destroy it. The only help is to reformat and reformatting means kissing the old content goodbye. Or rather, issuing the dd command to the wrong disk is the kiss of death. Formatting it will merely again make it usable, but still empty.

It’s recommended to copy the raw ROM image to the same directory as the  DD command and rename it to something really simple. No need to add complexity by getting a stupidly long path and equally long and stupid filename, right? So mine went to the local directory and was renamed to “rom.raw“. My command was this:

dd bs=4096 if=rom.raw of=\\?\Device\HarddiskVolume21 –progress

Strongly suggest the –progress parameter as the process is quite slow and takes quite long. Pushinbg close to 4GB of data over USB2 (in my case) and a MicroSD IS slow, and validating the progress is a good way to ensure it did just hang.

Did it work? yet to find out – I entertain myself writing this as the dd command works in the background

Learning by doing: Why do people insist on messing with shells when it can so safely, comfortably and easily be done using an application with a proper GUI? Why, oh why?

So, install the uboot 13 on the device, download the image and then use this non-bloatware “write image to device” tool:

https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download

Booted and now have todays build of the system running on the N900 device

Having said all of this; Partition Wizard is still a great program

Sometimes this might be the purpose, getting rid of old junk and starting fresh on the new location.

I must admit that I am a collector; my c64 history, all the articles I ever wrote and ALL mails ever written.

For quite some time, but many years ago, did I use Forté Agent. It was brilliant as it could handle mail and Usenet news in one package. I was even a paying user for very long, provided points of view for the future development even if I now realise that there was a lot going on behind the scene with the program. It was sold to Alcatel and then divested again from Alcatel (who naturally failed big doing anything relevant to the product!). Eventually Mozilla Thunder showed up – it was just as competent, and it was free. News was deleted from the offerings of my ISP and the other News servers that could be accessed for free were closed. With News not being accessible, migrating to Thunderbird I found that I had produced quite a lot that was now locked in, in the Agent proprietary storage format. BUMMER!

I have migrated the archive with every swap of computer since, both for me and my wife until today where the ultimate solution has been applied – it’s now being uploaded to GMail, so it’s not available and not bound to me remembering to migrate it every time. RELIEF!

So how did I do it?

1) First step – extract it from the Agent cage.

This is a tricky step. The only relevant solution is to extract it using the only relevant converter there is. Aid4Mail. This program converts also very large mail boxes between formats. I used Agent as source and Outlook PST as destination.

2) Second step – get it to GMail.

The trick here is to use Outlook as the vehicle that takes you there. Basically I followed this guide.

What you need to do is to

a) Enable IMAP in GMail. Under Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP there is an option to simply enable it. Save the setting and that piece is taken care of.

b) Define a GMail account via IMAP in Outlook. To be honest, this is the tricky part. Defining username, password and servers might be straight forward, but you need to do the advanced setting, defining SSL and also a specific port. There are guides available for this, for example this one (Swedish I’m afraid but I’m sure you can find it in your language as well or have it translated).

c) The guide referenced on the first line of this section suggests you import messages from the PST file. That’s not really needed. It’s even a fairly clumsy solution. All you need to do is to open the PST file. (Select Open from the Archive menu). Quite a lot easier as the target is not to have the mail available in Outlook when I’m done with this. If it was, you can of course also copy the PST to the hidden directory where all of the others are also placed.

d) Now the really easy part – just select the directory with the mail and copy it got the GMail folder. It will naturally take LONG to copy data over IMAP. We are talking hours even with modest volumes, but who cares – let it work overnight and wake up a happier person!!!

Learnings

Did the above sound easy? In theory YES, but in practice NOT AT ALL!

My transfers were interrupted many times for various reasons.

Key one was that it wasn’t possible to create subfolders. Thing is – I didn’t have any subfolders so this was in fact an error that indicated unsupported characters in the directory names. Of course the “/” is not to be used, but I also guess that the “!” and the quotation mark itself.

Secondly there is a restriction on length of the tag name. If the foldername that gets to the tag is longer than the allowed tagname, then you’re our of luck.

It shows that I can just double click on the outline of the window, and hey presto – it’s there again!

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5302510/Server_2008__Win_7__Vista__Activator

The area seem fairly complex but the activator seem to support it all …

Total Commander – With the old roots in the Norton Commander structure and Directory Opus for the Amiga the two window file manager tradition is where I was born and bred. It has so many features that I simply don’t know how to do without it; pattern based mass renaming, support for all compressed formats, FTP, fully configurable button-bar, extensive search.

VLC – Videolan plays all the media-formats you feed it without the need to install the vast variety of codecs available. It’s all built in, nicely packaged and available for free. I wouldn’t mind a more cosmetic and skinned front-end, but the engine inside is second to none.

Firefox – I refuse to work with Internet Explorer. I believe in competition and a vital part of that is to steer away from the leading provider and support a challenger where I can do this without too much effort. So as you notice I do run Windows (XP, Vista and now 7) as all efforts to run Linux failed horribly. It has improved SO much but so many times did it fail on lack of support for a piece of hardware. I am well beyond the average user but even I am reluctant to go to the shell window and start issuing a “sudo” command, no to mention the “classical” “make and install” combination.

Must have plug-ins:

- Swedish and English dictionaries. I know you can’t always tell I use it

- Google Gears – Offline support

- IE tab – allow using IE for specific pages withour fireing up IE itself.

- Twitterbar - If you are a tweeter, twitterbar is fantastic. When you find a link to share, enter a comment in the address field and fire away the comment + link as a tweet.

- Xmarks - Synk your bookmarks between computers. It can do passwords as well but I never spent the time to get that to work. It’s worth the effort to install it by the bookmark synker alone.

Microsoft Office – Yes, Open Office cannot give me what I need – sorry! Pivotables based on an underlying SQL query to a MySQL database is yet to show up in OO, so there is no option for me.

Nokia Ovi Suite – I gues this replaced the PC Suite. Being a Nokia junkie, I do of course need this.

Vuze – Nuff said. Good shit that you need

Dropbox – You get access to a slice of diskspace on the web and a brilliant sync function to it. The stuff that I have at home and at work which I need to have consistent across is there. Source code for a project, EXE files that in the virus infested net never seem to get through in any other way, plus you can provide a link to a file or directory for someone.

Avast Antivirus - Going cheap, this is the best no money can buy in terms of safekeeping your environment.

ACDSee - My favourite program for handling the family pictures. I have used it since version 2, where it’s now in version 9. Very good! Favourite feature is the ability to rename files from an EXIF property.

Picasa – Picasa is a free picture managing program. Very good and the 3.5 has a truly nice face recognition feature. If it could do a few of the things ACDSee can, then I would terminate the use of ACDSee but so far they are complimentary.

Snagit – Snap pieces of the screen. The new “snipping tool” in Windows is a light version of Snagit and works really good (however a bit primitive) but nothing beats Snagit.

Thunderbird – Mail and news monster. Second to none. My mail is relayed to GMail so I can read it on the move, but mail at home is read using Thunderbird using IMAP. I then collect and delete it from the server using POP3 from Outlook. Might seem like a clumsy solution and to some extent it is. I am sort of halfways between webmail and client based mail, wanting the best of both worlds.

TweetDeck – Recent acquaintance. Really convenient for following feeds from twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. Actually made it possible to follow both Facebook and Twitter without much human CPU load.

I would want to say I use Spotify and Voddler a lot, but I honestly don’t. I have accounts, have both programs installed, friends working for Spotify and honestly support their cause with all my heart, but I consume local media using MediaPortal (TV, movies and sometimes music) on the HTPC and MediaMonkey (music) and SqueezeBox (music – hardware but the HTPC also run as a SqueezeServer)

Webservices

iGoogle – My opening page is the iGoogle page where I have a set of gadgets that shows the information I need on a regular basis

- Twitter gadget - Read your twitter feed in a compact way

- Stock portfolio – Monitor one or more stocks. I am naturally following my employer.

- GMail – THE online webmail. I collect my mail using POP3 (with no delete) from my normal accounts. Gives a common interface to all of it and also a storage repository.

- Latitude - Google’s positioning service that sits on top of the Google Maps

Anyway – it worked for some days on my 4 core CPU computer and it did a fairly good job even if I have spent hours and hours to manually adjust things. Very few false positives but very many unidentified.

There are a few things I would like to see addressed in an update:

* When it allocates a face to a name as “Suggestion” you can select if the programs assumption is correct by two easy to understand symbols. Pressing No it tries to match the face to another name and so on. Sometimes the face belongs to a person that just happened to be in the picture even if this is unintentional and you don’t want the person registered in your list, like if you took a shot as something or someone in a public place with lots of unknown people around. In the “unnamed” category you can select “Ignore Person”, but in the named albums this is not possible. PLEASE add “Ignore Person” to the right button menu for the people added to albums as suggestions. As it it now, these unknown faces ping pong between albums, tying to find a home it will never reach.

* The the right click menu for the “Suggestions” there is an option of adding a person to an album (“Add to People Album”). I have 466 identified contacts which makes this function totally impractical for any contact that does not have a name that starts with an “A”. Scrolling the list to later characters takes forever.

* Also for the “Suggestions”, you can double click the thumbnail and add the name to the persons on the picture. Sometime naming the people there, you still have the person in the album listed as a suggestion, even if you just filled in the name manually. This only happen sometimes and I find no system in when it works or not. I get the feeling that not all changes made to the picture opening a “Suggestion” is trapped by the program.

* In the same context, opening the picture of a suggestion and clicking the “X” symbol of the identified people on the list (even all of the people on the list) the suggestion is still there. As an example; my daughter in a group of people. None identified but the program has her suggested as on of the faces, but the wrong one. I open the picture and “X” away all the people that aren’t relevant to keep (right or wrong, I use this a “Ignore people” on a picture by picture basis). I then define my daughters name to the correct face. Not the picture contains *one* identified person – my daughter – and I press escape to get back to the list. Now, the album still has the suggestion to accept my daughter as being identified in the picture but a) she is already identified and b) the definition of the face to the suggested on is not there – I just deleted it.

* If I from the “Unnamed” category has chosen to Ignore Person, I can still see the same person from the same photo as a suggestion in one of the people album. When ignored in the Unnamed category the face should universally ignored.

* Also in the context of opening the picture of a “Suggestion” the option of manually adding people is not there.

* When I enter an album, sometimes I find that there is a person that is added that doesn’t belong there (so person X is present in the album of person Y). However, opening the picture I see that the person in the album isn’t even present in the picture. So all faces are properly named in the picture, but it’s still there in the wrong album.

* Similar to my reflection above, I have cases in the album of my wife where the thumbnail shows a picture of my daughter. My wife is present in the picture so the thumbnail correctly points to picture of my wife but shows another person in the same picture in the thumbnail. I right clicked my wifes album icon as listed under “People” but the thumbnail is still wrong.

It might be that I do something wrong but the results still indicate room for improvement. I do think these are errors in the implementation.

One other thing which should be considered is differentiating unnamed and unrecognised. I found it so that pictures feature a person whom I know but do not recall the name of (class mate of the children, person on a party I don’t recall the name of and so on). I would like to be able to have a convenient mean to allocate references to “identified but unnamed person X”.