[ROM][testing][suez] Lineage-16.0 [05 JULY 2022]

[smithbill]

I'll modify your guide slightly

Well, your write up is more informative & certainly more entertaining (I'll hazard a guess from your use of the term "hosed" that you're a good 20+ years younger than me! )

I should apologise to Op for the last few posts being off topic, but on the basis that lineage development on Suez is 'paused' whilst @ggow learns about fatherhood, it seemed helpful to post about how to reinstall the latest Amazon image & get root working (for the time being).

@likwidchz I am assuming from your detailed write up, that this worked fine for you with no real problems?

One minor correction I should make, is that you won't normally lose root when flashing a new ROM in TWRP. I believe the only reason you lose root in this case is because Amazon patched something in their later releases which over-wrote root.

Also, I've no idea what vbmeta is/does, so I've no idea if it was necessary to tick that box in Magisk.

 

[likwidchz]

Well, your write up is more informative & certainly more entertaining (I'll hazard a guess from your use of the term "hosed" that you're a good 20+ years younger than me! )

I should apologise to Op for the last few posts being off topic, but on the basis that lineage development on Suez is 'paused' whilst @ggow learns about fatherhood, it seemed helpful to post about how to reinstall the latest Amazon image & get root working (for the time being).

@likwidchz I am assuming from your detailed write up, that this worked fine for you with no real problems?

One minor correction I should make, is that you won't normally lose root when flashing a new ROM in TWRP. I believe the only reason you lose root in this case is because Amazon patched something in their later releases which over-wrote root.

Also, I've no idea what vbmeta is/does, so I've no idea if it was necessary to tick that box in Magisk.

Yeah! it worked for me. We will leave age as a mystery.
No real problems, everything was honestly pretty straight forward, everything worked without really any WTF moments..

I don't really get steps 10-11 portion. You patch the boot image/partition and wipe cache/dalvik then reboot to recovery and wipe cache and dalvik a 2nd time? Then reboot. seems kind of circular, but not sure. Does the boot image also populate the Cache and Dalvik? To be clear, I have no idea what in the world those partitions do. I could see somehow re'writing that portion if something is redundant in the steps.

And after spending all this time messing around with getting the OEM fire OS working at the latest release with root, its kind of garbage lol. Lot's of stuff to have to do, their "REGISTER THIS TABLET BS" logo on the front page, needing to replace the launcher with some other rando launcher. It's kind of fiddly.

I was having issues with one of the releases with lineage not working too well with an app I have that I coded with processing.org, I would get mixed framerates in it with Linage 12, 14, fire os and literally all of the different flavors. I also noticed battery life issues. One of them being one of the cpu's didn't ever slow down/sleep state and I saw bad battery life issues. To be clear, these tablets are old, used, I have 5 I bought off ebay to mess around with. I do not know if I am chasing the wind here with that one.

I would based on the off'topic'ness of this post, feel free to start a new one and we can discuss it there? Feel free to take your guide I re wrote and modify it again and make a new thread

One thing I can see helpful at least for me, is a listing of essential software apps to install for more customization of things. Maybe add some fluff to the write up about essential hacks/adjustments to the OEM OS to make it better.


Additionally it seems kind of silly. Spend all this time rooting the Fire OS, to install TWRP, to then put it back on and have to spend heaps of time messing with it to get the thing working the way you want vs just putting Lineage on it? Oh well. No one doesn't like a good comprehensive guide to do things.

Thanks again! This is really great.

 

[smithbill]

You can save yourself a lot of time & effort debloating etc by using the Fire Toolbox - it's quite helpful.

 

[likwidchz]

You can save yourself a lot of time & effort debloating etc by using the Fire Toolbox - it's quite helpful.

Oh yeah I used that in this example. Its pretty helpful.

 

[computerworm]

I don't know that I'd recommend monkeying with the partitions if aren't reasonably comfortable with command line tools in general... And just to say again - I'm not actually running Lineage 16. WiFi was entirely too unstable for me with the July 5th Lineage 16 ROM... So I'm actually running Lineage 14 on mine for now.

But basically, what I did was -

1. Grabbed the parted binary from https://github.com/edk2-porting/parted-android
2. Booted into twrp, adb pushed the parted binary to /tmp, chmod a+x'ed it
3. "unit b" tells parted to display partition start/end/size down to the byte
4. remove the system, cache and data partitions... I wanna say they were partitions 12, 13 and 14? Something like that. Been a week or so since I did it. (Looks like it's actually 13, 14 and 15 now that I grabbed the actual tablet to make the screenshot I attached below...)
5. Recreate system, cache and data so that they have the same partition numbers they did previously but with their sizes adjusted... Basically this means figure out how much you wanna increase the size of "system" by and then add that same number to the end sector of system, to both the start and end sectors of the new cache and to the start sector of the new data partition... Keeping the start sector of system and the end sector of data the same as they were before the modification.
6. Make sure you rename your newly created partitions to system, cache and userdata to match their original names...
7. Basically, when you're done, you want the output of parted's "print" command to look exactly the same as at the start except for the "end" number of system, the "start" and "end" numbers of cache and the "start" number of data.
8. After that you need to get the kernel to register the new partition table... The simplest way to do that is probably just to reboot the recovery.

Now the system partition image that comes with the ROM is an image for a system partition of the original size... After flashing the image you want to use this to adjust the flashed filesystem to take up the full size of the partition. The Wipe -> Advanced Wipe -> (select System) Repair or Change Filesystem -> Resize File System option in the twrp UI appears to run resize2fs for you, if you'd prefer not to do it yourself from the adb shell.

Here's a screenshot showing the "end result"... This is what my suez' partition table currently looks like. Notice the size of my system partition is 3093299200... The original size of system was 1692925952.

View attachment 5683061

Hi Kate6,

I was having trouble with installing GApps, so i tried to do what you described here, and at one point parted told me i had to reboot to get the kernel to register the partition changes. So I did, and now my device is in a bootloop. I don't understand, I was very careful of which partitions I nuked. I'm sure I didn't overwrite recovery. But it shows the Amazon logo screen and that's it. I can't even boot to TWRP. I tried to follow these instructions here, and it didn't work. Any idea how to fix it?

 

[Kate6]

Hi Kate6,

I was having trouble with installing GApps, so i tried to do what you described here, and at one point parted told me i had to reboot to get the kernel to register the partition changes. So I did, and now my device is in a bootloop. I don't understand, I was very careful of which partitions I nuked. I'm sure I didn't overwrite recovery. But it shows the Amazon logo screen and that's it. I can't even boot to TWRP. I tried to follow these instructions here, and it didn't work. Any idea how to fix it?

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-fire-hd-10-2017-suez.3913639/

 

[Shack70]

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-fire-hd-10-2017-suez.3913639/

Power off completely, hold the volume down and power at the same time. When the Amazon logo appears it should say recovery at the bottom in small print. At that point let go of the two buttons. and it should enter TWRP.

 

[psi78]

Power off completely, hold the volume down and power at the same time. When the Amazon logo appears it should say recovery at the bottom in small print. At that point let go of the two buttons. and it should enter TWRP.

In other words (because the Volume down is not marked) hold down power and the Volume key next to the headphone jack.
In case the repartitioning damaged the recovery partition i guess it'll get more complicated. I guess i'd try to reflash recovery then with TWRP from a pc and suez in fastboot mode.
See also here how to flash recovery in fastboot mode.

How to Flash Recovery Image Using ADB and Fastboot

Bootloader/Fastboot mode can come in quite handy to flash anything on your android. So here is how to flash recovery image using ADB and Fastboot.

techrrival.com

I think the key combination for suez to get it into fastboot mode was to hold power and volume up at device startup, so the other volume button near the edge of the longer side of the display/not near the headphone jack.
Edit: Hmm no, doesnt't work on my device

In case the device doesn't react anymore you could also force a reset by holding down power button 20 seconds.

 

[Mlinko6]

Dear All,

Does someone has the same Issue? Main Storage - not available? Can I somehow change that?

Thx!
Rok

 

[Mlinko6]

View attachment 5761887Dear All,

Does someone has the same Issue? Main Storage - not available? Can I somehow change that?

Thx!
Rok

I think I found the solution... Will keep you posted. Found it! Sorry to bother you!

 

[Kate6]

In other words (because the Volume down is not marked) hold down power and the Volume key next to the headphone jack.
In case the repartitioning damaged the recovery partition i guess it'll get more complicated. I guess i'd try to reflash recovery then with TWRP from a pc and suez in fastboot mode.
See also here how to flash recovery in fastboot mode.

How to Flash Recovery Image Using ADB and Fastboot

Bootloader/Fastboot mode can come in quite handy to flash anything on your android. So here is how to flash recovery image using ADB and Fastboot.

techrrival.com

I think the key combination for suez to get it into fastboot mode was to hold power and volume up at device startup, so the other volume button near the edge of the longer side of the display/not near the headphone jack.
Edit: Hmm no, doesnt't work on my device

In case the device doesn't react anymore you could also force a reset by holding down power button 20 seconds.

It's got a whole host of complexities and kinks because of how the bootloader hack works, where it modified the partition table to add the recovery_x and boot_x partitions... But one (in my opinion) very nice thing about this device is that regardless of how screwed up it gets, the unbricking procedure described in the first comment of https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/unlock-root-twrp-unbrick-fire-hd-10-2017-suez.3913639/ where you open the thing up and short a particular contact to ground should literally always work.

I feel like that might be a simpler path to take than trying to help someone relatively inexperienced who tried to do something a bit too outside their skill set figure out precisely what they did and what ended up getting screwed up as a result.

This device's actual fastboot mode is pretty heavily locked down. The bootloader hack enables a "hacked fastboot" mode that lets you flash any of the partitions. But there's all sorts of ways the bootloader hack can malfunction if you've left the partition table in an uncertain or inconsistent state and restarted the hardware.

 

[Sherooo3]

hallo everyone,


i dont understand why I keep getting err 7 while installing lineage-16.0-20220705-UNOFFICIAL-suez.zip
i am using twrp_suez_3.6.1-9.0 but also used twrp_suez_3.6.1-9.2 and it didn't work.
i wiped everything but the sd-card before installing the Rom. and also tried to reboot in recovery after wiping.

lineage-16.0-20220506-UNOFFICIAL-suez.zip works. it's just the lineage-16.0-20220705-UNOFFICIAL-suez.zip not wanting to be installed
any more Ideas?
System =15998 MB/used 43MB
Data= 9275MB /used 0MB
cash=3440MB/used 6MB

 

[psi78]

hallo everyone,


i dont understand why I keep getting err 7 while installing lineage-16.0-20220705-UNOFFICIAL-suez.zip
i am using twrp_suez_3.6.1-9.0 but also used twrp_suez_3.6.1-9.2 and it didn't work.
i wiped everything but the sd-card before installing the Rom. and also tried to reboot in recovery after wiping.

lineage-16.0-20220506-UNOFFICIAL-suez.zip works. it's just the lineage-16.0-20220705-UNOFFICIAL-suez.zip not wanting to be installed
any more Ideas?
System =15998 MB/used 43MB
Data= 9275MB /used 0MB
cash=3440MB/used 6MB

Hmm did you repartition your System partition?
Looks quite big.
Doesn't make much sense to make it that big though, as in Android the System partition is readonly normally. So only ROM and gapps normally go on it. The rest will be unused space, because all further apps and app updates go to Data partition. It's not like in Windows or Linux where you install more programs and apps to your System partition.

On my Xperia Z5 the System partition is 5GB, and only 1,8 GB used by Android 11 and gapps.

Also in TWRP i'd try to repair/ reformat the partitions (Cache, System, Data), then power off first (before you flash the ROM), and restart to recovery, and only then flash the ROM and gapps.

 

[luk2009]

Wow well thank you, this is, quite helpful info. I'm going to do it right now.
Honestly the instructions to build from scratch is quite a bit better anyway. I'd rather learn how to do it mysself. again, many thanks.

I do not find much comprehensive writeups with clearly defined steps these days, again thank you.

Perhaps your write up will be good for a new post? I'll follow the guide and let you know if there are any stumbling blocks I encounter. I can expand on the how to if needed.

Infact, I'll modify your guide slightly. *Biased to using a PC for everything and not trying to do this only on a tablet directly, honestly that seems painful

**Modified guide below.

1. Download FireOS v 5.3.7.3 from Amazon & rename it to a .zip
Get it here -> https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G2JXLC4L34GX73TE
I found this URL by searching "Fire HD 10 update" and scroll down to
Fire HD 10 (7th Generation)
FireOS 5 | FireOS 5.3.7.3
The URL to Bin is https://www.amazon.com/update_Fire_HD10_7th_Gen

2. Flash it to your Fire HD 10 (Suez) in TWRP (it won't overwrite TWRP but you will lose root)
This is obvious you lose root because you are flashing a new OS, but because you have TWRP installed you are protected from screwing yourself from not being able to revert to Lineage or lower/higher OS version.

3. Install Fire HD toolbox on your PC.

4. Enable developer mode on the tablet.
Settings/Device Options, Tap on Serial Number a bunch of times.
Enable ADB. You will see an RSA thumbprint show up. Accept it.

5. Download Magisk on your PC and ADB to install it to the tablet.
You can install the APK file from the fire HD toolbox app.
Dos command line syntax:
View attachment 5745939

6. On your PC, open up the OS binary you renamed to zip and pull out the boot.img file in the root of the zip.
Place the boot.img file on the tablet. The Documents folder will work.

7. Open up the installed Magisk app from step 5, Click the Install button, Select "Patch vbmeta in boot image" and click next. Click "Select and Patch a File". In The browse section, tap the 3 dots on the upper right hand side of the screen and click "Show SD card" This is your internal storage not an actual SD card. Browse to your Documents folder, or wherever you crammed the "boot.img" file.
It will take a couple moments, you should see some stuff on the screen. It takes the boot.img file and creates a new patched one in a specific directory. Remember where this new patched boot image file went, you will need this for later.
View attachment 5745945

8. Once you've generated a new 'patched/rooted' .img file using Magisk you then need to reboot back into TWRP.

9. Once in TWRP install the new patched boot image on step 7, you can browse for that file on the file system. You will patch the boot partition. Select install in TWRP, browse for the file and make sure you selected only the boot checkbox. Make sure it's to the boot partition or you may well screw up your Fire HD 10!

10. While still in TWRP, wipe cache/dalvik. Then select reboot, and reboot to Recovery.

11. When it reboots to TWRP *Recovery mode, then Wipe Cache/Davlik again.
Select Wipe, then click the Dalvik and Cache checkboxes only. Then reboot.

12. Once your Fire HD reboots into the OS, check in Magisk, ADB shell from your PC and try SU'ing, you should have root.
If you don't, you hosed one of these steps.
Please note the FIRE HD will take a few moments to start back up again after it... does whatever it needs to do to like "Reticulate splines" Sim City was the best, wasn't it?

13. Load up Magisk click the shield looking icon at the bottom enable the option SharedUID Shell.

14. On your PC ADB shell into your tablet, do an SU. You should see
View attachment 5745999

15, Tell all your friends on Facebook you rooted a 5 year old tablet.

Since you already have FireHD toolbox installed, feel free to rip out all the trash you don't want and go from there. Debloat and Replace the launcher with something better..

Then you can use Fire Toolbox to debloat & replace Amazon launchers etc etc

the tablet keeps trying to go up.
the Fire logo appears and then
optimizing system storage and applications....
then the fire logo again and then
optimizing system storage and applications....
and that process repeats itself indefinitely.

what can I do?

 

[likwidchz]

the tablet keeps trying to go up.
the Fire logo appears and then
optimizing system storage and applications....
then the fire logo again and then
optimizing system storage and applications....
and that process repeats itself indefinitely.

what can I do?

Not sure what you did to cause it to get into this condition.

If you have TWRP on it, wipe the device within TRWP and give it another go.

If you don't have TWRP on it, Try flashing the OEM binary again with fastboot. Then once its flashed and boots up, root it and try again with the lineage rom.

If someone can correct me on this, I think that is soft bricked. You might want to search around for what that is and how to solve it unless my attempt at help is indeed help and not a rabbit hole.

Good luck.
Take care,

 

[luk2009]

Not sure what you did to cause it to get into this condition.

If you have TWRP on it, wipe the device within TRWP and give it another go.

If you don't have TWRP on it, Try flashing the OEM binary again with fastboot. Then once its flashed and boots up, root it and try again with the lineage rom.

If someone can correct me on this, I think that is soft bricked. You might want to search around for what that is and how to solve it unless my attempt at help is indeed help and not a rabbit hole.

Good luck.
Take care,

I have TWRP and I have wiped everything except internal storage and flash the bin file changed to .zip
and have the same problem

 

[luk2009]

I have TWRP and I have wiped everything except internal storage and flash the bin file changed to .zip
and have the same problem

I did the process several times and the fifth time, the system came up.

fire os 5.7.0.0

 

[likwidchz]

Well that is weird then. Perhaps someone else can chime in and provide a reason. I'm just guessing at this time.

Glad you got it all taken care of.

 

[psi78]

Well that is weird then. Perhaps someone else can chime in and provide a reason. I'm just guessing at this time.

Glad you got it all taken care of.

I'm no expert on this, but i think ART (Android Runtime) is precompiling apps with dex2oat tool (for quick startup and preloading by the Zygote Process) at the first boot after installation.
On former Android versions (before Android 5) this is done by Dalvik, but just in time compiled then at app start i think in Android 5/LOS 12 it's still Dalvik.

I read that some ROMs have a timeout regarding the boot process, and reboot after a time.
So i guess if the boot time is too long, rebooting Android several times leads to precompiling a part of the apps/apks, then the next boot some more of the apps are precompiled and apparently after some boots all of the apps.
Wiping Dalvik/ART cache on Android 5/LOS12 leads to this whole precompiling process done again (i just tested it on LOS12/Android 5.1 for suez)
So try to avoid it if not necessary i guess.

Maybe also something wasn't wiped yet, wiping internal storage, or also formatting Data besides formatting System and Cache partitions, is possible before you do a reinstallation of a ROM, i've done it several times.

Edit: hmm apparently from Android 5.0 and later ART is used, but it can be configured in the system.prop of a device before ROM building (i've done it when i compiled LineageOS for my Xperia Z5) or in /system/build.prop with a built ROM.

 

[likwidchz]

I'm no expert on this, but i think ART (Android Runtime) is precompiling apps with dex2oat tool (for quick startup and preloading by the Zygote Process) at the first boot after installation.
On former Android versions this is done by Dalvik, i think in Android 5/LOS 12 it's still Dalvik.

I read that some ROMs have a timeout regarding the boot process, and reboot after a time.
So i guess if the boot time is too long, rebooting Android several times leads to precompiling a part of the apps/apks, then the next boot some more of the apps are precompiled and apparently after some boots all of the apps.
Wiping Dalvik cache on Android 5/LOS12 leads to this whole precompiling process done again (i just tested it on LOS12/Android 5.1 for suez)
So try to avoid it if not necessary i guess.

Maybe also something wasn't wiped yet, wiping internal storage, or also formatting Data besides formatting System and Cache partitions, is possible before you do a reinstallation of a ROM, i've done it several times.

I think they need to patch these tablets... all of them, so you can see the boot process happening and not stamp an image at boot. That way when something bombs out, there is some breadcrumbs as to what tanked.

Glad you know about this! I had no idea how this stuff works behind the scenes.