Why?
I want to use Ubuntu Touch os since iphone and android won't let me access the terminal easily and it is not that customizable. The steps include unlocking the phone bootloader and using ubports to install Ubuntu Touch.
adb Didn't Work
So yesterday is an interesting day.
Everything went the way a normal weekend would go.
Then in the afternoon I was trying the adb on my Ubuntu computer, but it just wouldn't work no matter how hard I tried. I tried adb devices and adb start-server and adb kill-server but none of them responded, and I reinstalled it 3 times, and installed the platform-tools twice but it still wouldn't work. Miraculously it worked on the cloud server.
It is quite uncommon for an application to have a bug that is hard to fix like this, well maybe except for wine or android emulators bugs.
adb wouldn't respond with all of the commands
adb devices
adb start-server
adb kill-server
And I asked ChatGPT how to fix the bug, and it told me various ways like using strace and aux and grep the service, but the just wouldn't work. Any commands associated with adb would freeze in the terminal.
Trying to Debug the Problem
So I tried the process
ps aux | grep adb
pkill -f adb
It did terminate adb but nothing else, adb won't respond.
Only adb version
did respond, then I tried rm -rf ~/.android
These wouldn't respond when I tried to start the server and debug,
adb -L tcp:5037 fork-server server --log debug
env -i adb start-server
I mean if there are bugs the bugs should be easily spotted, but in this
case it would just freeze in terminal
Then I tried to trace the startup process
strace adb start-server
but it showed
bind(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(0), sin_addr=inet_addr(127.0.0.1)} 16) = 0
connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(5037), sin_addr=inet_addr(127.0.0.1)} 16) = -1 ECONNREFUSED (Connection refused)
close(3) = 0
socket(AF_INET6, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3
bind(3, {sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(0), sin6_flowinfo=htonl(0), inet_pton(AF_INET6, ::1, &sin6_addr), sin6_scope_id=0} 28) = 0
connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(5037), sin6_flowinfo=htonl(0), inet_pton(AF_INET6, ::1, &sin6_addr), sin6_scope_id=0} 28
Then I was really frustrated. Then I tried to sudo apt-get purge libudev-dev
And I tried that command, and it broke my computer. Suddenly my computer could no longer boot.
Remembering the Homework Deadline
Then I remembered I had to do a homework by the end of the day(like 2 hours work), so I was very anxious indeed, and I went to the school and tried work on the windows computer there.
But the homework wouldn't work in the school's windows computer(without python) and gooogle colab, since it constantly complained about modules and libraries.
And I tried for 2 hours without any success of making the homework run on the school's computer or the cloud server, and the school's library is closing, so I went back home again and tried to fix the computer.
Emergency Mode
The computer boots into emergency mode when it starts, and I had no idea what to do. After trying the root password several times I finally managed to boot into root, but the systemd was broken, and I entered recovery mode and tried to fsck the system.
A dev service was kind of broken, and Ubuntu couldn't launch.
Anyways, it didn't work well, and I didn't know how to connect to the internet with the computer. So I tried booting from a usb disk, and it didn't went well either. I still couldn't connect to the internet.
Installing from USB Again
So I tried to install Ubuntu again from the usb stick. But when booting the old network thing went wrong again. So I tried changing the network service timeout and it worked.
sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/networkd-wait-online.service
Then change add timeout to 1 second after the exec command.
Then I could only make Ubuntu connect to internet with ethernet, connecting my phone to the computer with a usb and then by using ip link to list devices then sudo dhclient enx… to connect to that device, then I could go online, but there was this no additional driver found, and I tried cloning the rt driver and it didn't work. However, it continuously shows no Wi-Fi adapters found.
Rubbish Redmi Unlocker
However, my redmi phone was locked by the bootloader, so I needed to unlock the bootloader to be root. However, I opened the https://unlock.update.mini.com and it wouldn't download for like 10 times. It is very crappy indeed. Then when I finally get it to download it returned a zip with only exe files in it, which is terrible and inconsiderate for the company.
I tried running the exe with wine but it face so many problems. It wouldn't even display. Wine is the most buggy program in Ubuntu. Yesterday I went to the school and tried running it on the school's windows computer but it couldn't detect the Redmi phone connected.
So since the bootloader was only in exe I decided it is very crap anyways. So I started to hate redmi like I hate windows.
Phone Ownership
Then I thought about phone ownership and reckoned that if I cannot access the bootloader I do not really own this phone. I cannot customize anything, the phone is just basically owned by the company. Don't talk about security and integrity measures, if I cannot do customized settings in this phone I do not own it 100%, and that's not good.
Trying to Overload the Phone
And then I thought since I do not own the phone and the phone is old I want to try overload the phone with adb.
Adb have no root access since the phone is locked, and I tried fastboot too, it wouldn't load.
Then I tried to play around with the adb shell and tried to overload the device. I tried a infinite loops.adb shell "while true; do :; done & It instantly made the old phone unusable, but nothing else, and when
unplugged the phone would still run as good as normal.
Then I tried to load large files into the phone while true; do adb push large_file.txt /sdcard/; done, but the storage soon filled up and the data part was only accessible by root, and the phone was usable after all the mess around.
No Wifi-Adapters on Ubuntu
Then the Ubuntu Gnome couldn't connect to Wifi, and I couldn't figure out the reason. I could only connect to wifi with a phone and usb cables.
Then I tried nmcli device wifi list, but it returned
IN-USE BSSID SSID MODE CHAN RATE >
I figured it was because I disabled the network devices earlier on, and after ls /lib/systemd/system | grep etwork it returned multiple services,
systemd-networkd.service
systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
NetworkManager.service
NetworkManager-wait-online.service
the networkd service causing the A start job is running for wait for network to be configured problem, I might actually accidentally disabled the other.
Then I tried other desktop environments like lxde but lxde wouldn't boot and encountered multiple system problems.
Watching the Figure Skating Test Skate Free Program
And then I had tried like 12 hours without success and missed my homework deadline so I was very much in distress. It was 5 am in the morning. So I watched figure skating test skate free program live on 1tv and went to sleep.
Installing Ubuntu Again
Then I installed the Ubuntu again today, erasing yesterday's partition and there was no Wi-Fi adapter problems.
The steps are
- boot the system (with/without network configurations)
- connect phone to computer and use dhclient to connect to Internet
sudo apt update && sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop gdm3sudo systemctl start gdm3
Then enable the timeout in 'systemd-networkd-wait-online.service'.