I decided to try and re-use an old Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini (no, not the X10 Mini Pro version). The phone was network unlocked (with a network/operator provided code), but it still had a load of bloat-ware on it from the operator (music store, news, contact sync, game trials, etc etc etc ) most of which couln’t be deleted.
So I decided to try and go with the Cyanogenmod custom Android Roms.
I had not done anything like this on a phone before.
Rooting – getting root access as the first step to cleaning the phone up.
I rooted with SuperOneClick per http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803682
I also installed BusyBox Installer per http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1117713 but apart from telling me the phone was rooted and so forth this wasn’t much help really – or so it seemed at least, and for what I wanted to do – without the recovery rom already applied.
I couldn’t get the Rom Manager from the store due to the version of the phones OS, or any of the other stuff from here http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/ClockworkMod_Recovery#Installation_Methods
but I found CWMInstaller from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1257701
Having the phone at the latest version already, I got this and gave it a whirl on an Ubuntu Debian Gnu/Linux box.
(If you’re running 64-bit linux, you need to get ia32-libs or multilibs or something like that as the Android SDK, and the adb that ship with cwminstaller are all 32-bit and look for 32-bit libs.)
That didn’t work 😦 At first I got an error about something to do with “protocol invalid” or similiar, and that was just a running adb instance. I cleared with “adb server stop” or “killall adb“.
Then I also got permissions issues, that I solved by using “sudo su” first and then re-running the cwminstaller script as root.
Lastly, I got an error to do with “…mmap() failed…” that I couldn’t resolve.
No matter what I did (the magick-trick™ apparently involving multiple repeated presses of the BACK key when the initial “Sony Ericsson” test shows up on the Xperia’s screen), I couldn’t get the phone to boot into recovery. Then I found xrecovery.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=878426
The steps involved manually putting filed on the phones system folder, but it seemed to be doing pretty must what the CWMInstaller was doing, so I just replaced the CWM installer files with those from xrecovery, and re-used the cwminstaller script. 🙂
I also renamed xrecovery.tar to recovery.tar and edited chargemon to refer to recovery.tar instead of xrecovery. I know I needn’t have, just deleting recovery.tar and leaving the new chargemon and xrecovery.tar alone should have worked equally as well, but it was late and I was tired!
When I ran the scriipt, I again got the mmap() error, but this time on reboot the X10 recovery incantation worked – the phone accepted the multiple-back-button-presses when the text “Sony Ericsson” showed, and went into recovery!
WOOHOO!
Now to get the custom Rom on there.
Things should be easy from here on out.
I copied MiniCM6-1.0.2.zip (from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=961707 or https://code.google.com/p/minicm/ ) to update.zip and put in root of phone SD card.
It seemed to take the ROM, but when I rebooted it just appeared to go into and endless looping booty thing with an animated Android-bot logo showing 😦
No problems, if the Xperia X10 Mini hangs at all, just hold HOME+POWER and the phone will reboot.
I found some tips online, one of which was that it can take 10mins on the first boot – so there may have been nothing wrong that a little patience wouldn’t have sorted.
Regardless, I followed the steps and again booted X10 Mini into recovery, and did an Erase / Factory Reset
Then another Reboot
Then left the phone for 10 mins with power.
After this I checked – and yes, another Woohoo moment – the phone had booted into MiniCM and an Android setup screen was displayed.
There was an annoying Launcher option that kept displaying, but another reboot fixed that.
MiniCM6 is pretty nice and responsive so far.
Have fun !
An Cuasán 