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This weekend I took on the project of getting Ice Cream Sandwich installed onto a Samsung Galaxy S phone, the Verizon branded Fascinate. Getting the Fascinate to comply with what I believed to be a reasonable request was made difficult by some annoying traits of the hardware itself, but that is a story for another time.
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If you’ve ever worked with the Samsung Galaxy S line of phones, you are probably aware of the Norse theme the recovery method and software employs. The software which runs on the phone itself and receives the firmware images to flash is known as Loke, and the software you run on the computer is called Odin.
Odin is, as its name suggests, a very powerful piece of software. It allows the user to flash new ROMs or individual partitions to their Galaxy S device, even if it’s not otherwise bootable. This recovery capability is used by Samsung and its authorized parties to update and repair Galaxy S devices, though it’s equally useful to those of us who wish to modify our phones. Odin makes it possible to recover your device in even the most dire of software situations, meaning it’s nearly impossible to damage a Galaxy S device to the point it can’t be repaired (outside of physically smashing it, at least).
But Odin has a serious problem, and it’s not Ice Giants; Odin is leaked software from Samsung, and can’t be legally distributed. The only versions of Odin you are going to find online were stolen from Samsung and have been floating around on random shady sites for untold amounts of time. This is about the worse source of software you can possibly use, and in fact, many of the Galaxy S guides will actually tell you to turn off your anti-virus software before downloading and running Odin due to “false positives”. Yeah…I’m good.
Though even if Odin was freely available, I don’t own the prerequisite Windows computer to run it on in the first place. Software which has the capability of easily destroying my hardware is not the kind of thing I like to run in WINE or even a VM either. So what is a non-Windows having, software license obeying, guy supposed to do? Full Story |
