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Flash Nexus7 like a rock star

Are you tired of typing a hostname, username, password and WiFi password every time you flash Nexus7 with Ubuntu Core images?

Do you wish to automate those boring steps?

Do you wish you could reboot into fastboot mode over ssh without reaching and fiddling with volume down and power keys?

Now you can!

$ bzr branch lp:~ubuntu-nexus7/ubuntu-nexus7/preseed

Has a nifty command called

$ ./prepare-preseed

By default it takes preseed.cfg, attempts to copy wifi.cfg or fetch current active WiFi connection settings from Network Manager's /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/* downloads latest bootimg and twiddles it to include all of the above.

After that you can fastboot flash standard user-data image + this cusom bootimg and voila, upon fastboot reboot ubiquity will come up and will automatically answer all the questions for you and boot into desktop with wifi connected.

If you want to customize settings simply edit the sample preseed.cfg.
If you do not want to always type in sudo password to get the network password you can run:

$ ./get-network-info > wifi.cfg

After that each reflash will be a breeze and not require root password. (Note that I uploaded udev rules in fastboot a while a go to allow using fastboot as a non-privileged user, if you need to support more devices please file bugs against android-tools with the output of lsusb when your device is connected).

So what about rebooting back into fastboot mode?

Well, I recently uploaded upstart 1.6.1-1ubuntu3 into Raring that supports:

$ sudo reboot -f bootloader

That will get you back into fastboot mode.

Happy Hacking everyone!
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