Sailfish X installation via VirtualBox [successful]
asked 2017-10-24 00:25:10 +0300
Being a tad impatient to wait for the OSX/Linux versions of the Sailfish X installer (as this would be months, if at all) I've been trying to install Sailfish X on the Xperia X using VirtualBox in combination with the (freely) available Windows images from modern.ie (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/).
Both the Windows 7 and Windows 10 images seem to refuse to install the device USB drivers (both in the "green light" Xperia X mode and the "blue light" Fastboot mode, even though for both cases the USB devices are identified properly).
UPDATE #1: Thanks to the tip from Kao, I learned that I needed to change the USB version for the virtual machine from 1.1 to 2 or 3. Also followed the advice to create filters for the USB devices so I didn't have to enable these manually.
(This requires you to install the VirtualBox Extension Pack if you don't have this installed already).
After this I could unlock the device using the instructions mentioned in the Jolla manual (using the link there to the instructions on the Sony site) and now the USB devices where properly installed and I successfully ran the "flash-on-windows.bat" script to flash the device.
After flashing the device "successfully" (as mentioned by the script), I ended up in a boot-loop where I never get past the Sony logo-screen. So I'am downloading the entire Sailfish X distrubution from the Jolla shop again (now on the Windows guest machine) and will try again, hopefully this'll fix the boot-loop.
UPDATE #2: The bootloop wasn't fixed (flashed a total of 7 times, all with the same boot-loop as a result), now restored Android using Emma. Hopefully better luck tomorrow.
UPDATE #3: Did a quick try again just now, everything seems to be fine except for a "The system cannot find the drive specified"-notice just before it continues to start the flashing. Here's a screenshot of the command line output: https://i.imgur.com/ePqnzAD.png Maybe someone can point something obvious I'm overlooking ;-)
UPDATE #4: No matter what I tried (downloading files, trying to manually influence the oem partition, etc) nothing seeming to work. As I'm (much) more familiar with *NIX systems, I was happy to read @DrYak edit to @mosen answer that there are now official Linux Instructions available, so I tried those.
They worked flawlessly and I can now enjoy Sailfish X on the Xperia X.
Thanks for all the suggestions and helpful tips!
Handy links I encountered/created/inspired along the way:
- DrYak has created some .rules for use with the USB devices I encountered during the various stages
- The USB settings I added to VirtualBox, collected using the tip from @Kao on how not to have to enter them manually
I remember other people having a similar problem, see here: https://together.jolla.com/question/169170/white-screen-with-sonysolved/
Kao ( 2017-10-24 09:03:49 +0300 )editwhen you download your package from jolla, why don't you use the flasher script for linux? only things you maybe have to install are fastboot(for unlocking the bootloader) and adb(for flashing). but i think adb is already installed on most linux machines.
breiti_oi ( 2017-10-24 12:42:31 +0300 )edit