RE: Moto E2015 Surnia

MrT10001

Just tried installing to this device and I hit some frustrating walls. Using a Windows 11 PC and also Ubuntu 20.04 on a virtual machine.

The Halium install instructions as clear as they are, are open to interpretation for an idiot like me who is trying this for the first time on a low end cheap device.

1)Do I run halium install from the PC or from within the phone, ie through the CLI in TWRP?
(halium-install -p ut -v path/to/rootfs.tar.gz path/to/system.img)
This threw up errors, mainly "halium-install not found" even though I was in the halium install folder, or permission denied.

There was no prompt or for me a known way to create a password (could be permission denied).

The result anyway was a soft bricked phone that TWRP ran into a loop, solved by flashbooting manually back to stock ROM.

I reinstalled TWRP and wiped data and the other partitions. e/O/S sideloaded with no issues and is working fine.

I am pretty technically tuned with a lot of things, until the nuts and bolts of the CLI fall on me, I can work through some issues, but this one had me stumped and I am not one to give up.
There is really good technical writing in the documentation for UT, but it could be better, i.e if aimed at an 8 year old (this is what I teach to my adult students) then everyone will pick it up. I think there are holes which need clarity, but I do understand peoples times are limited and not everybody has an understanding of putting things across. If I had the money of Elon Musk, this is certainly a project I would invest in.

arubislander

@mrt10001 I there even a port for this device?

MrT10001

@arubislander No not as such on the installer.....

But there is this link

It still bear relevance to the documentation so I thought I would give it a go. Once I get an understanding of manual installation steps, I can try others.

MrT10001

As I discuss this with myself, these are kind of my notes, so if someone else wants to try these may assist.

I am not a programmer, software engineer or anything of the ilk. I can navigate clumsily round DOS commands and basic Terminal commands in Ubuntu and other distro's, so I am ahead in some respects, but an absolute novice with software!
I have led a disciplined electrical and electronic fault finding hobby and job. I did in my younger days repair to component level, but have lost this skill, so I am relatively good at resolving faults.

That's me, the main bit now:

Moto E (2015) Surnia is a really cheap second user phone to buy, picked one up for £8 on eBay. It is only 8Gb and 1Gb of RAM, but the fact that it is so cheap, if I brick the device, I have not lost too much cash.

Instructions on the linked forum page are good, but you still require some knowledge of the CLI and file ownership. Motorola bootloader is pretty much straightforward and Googling will show you what to do. To me that was the easy part.
Ran the instructions from within the halium-install folder in Ubuntu 22.04, so not in TWRP on the device but on the PC. This was not abundantly clear to me, but trial and error got me past that faux pas.
Forgot to ./(sh?) halium-install which would be nice to know so when running it use ./halium-install inside the unzipped halium install folder (doh.. I have used ./ and the sh command a lot when manually installing VBOX utilities pack in a virtual machine).
I kept getting a permission denied error when running halium-install. So I googled fu'd and realised I probably didn't have ownership so took ownership with the chmod command:

chmod u+x halium-install

This resolved the issue and allowed the halium-install command to work.

Then the phone showed up on desktop and not in adb. This causes the install not to be pushed to the device. Run:

sudo adb kill-server
sudo adb start-server

This showed the phone up in the CLI (adb devices)

After that the install went through fine, so I am now going to be messing with this device to see what is working and what isn't - there is a list, but I will have a play.

I don't know if it will have any bearing, but I installed the prerequisites for the build environment from the UBports documentation - I think it must have as I got :35 :permission denied before hand when executing the halium-install and only permission denied after I installed all the dependencies.

So I have muddled my way through this and got a successful install, a nice learning curve for me, which would be pretty straightforward to most Linux users.