Rooting And Installing Apps
Much of this information is copied and pasted from kornyone’s work posted at xda-developers, but please include more detail as you find it.
- Do the prerequisites
- Connect PC to Q via USB.
- Check it’s connected by opening a terminal window (Start > cmd.exe on Windows) and typing “adb devices”. If it lists a device then you’re good to go. If not then go back to the prerequisites as you may have to modify the driver file as described there.
- Run ‘adb reboot bootloader’
- Run ‘fastboot oem unlock’. Then (Within 5 seconds run this to confirm): ‘fastboot oem unlock_accept’.
- Download this file — http://www.bliny.net/downloads/nexusq-boot.img. It is a Nexus Q boot.img with ro.secure=0, allowing us to remount /system and root device.
- Setup USB Debugging in Nexus Q via client app all over again (may require clearing data from client device Nexus Q app).
- Run ‘adb reboot bootloader’
- Run ‘fastboot boot nexusq-boot.img’. Your Nexus Q will now boot up unlocked, allowing:
- Run ‘adb remount’
- Push ‘su’ and ‘Superuser.apk’ from a good source. I use nightly CM9 su/Superuser from my HTC Doubleshot. Put su in /system/xbin/, put Superuser in /system/app. chmod the su binary 06755. (There’s many pages documenting how this is done).
- *OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED* — adb push busybox binary from a known good source (I also use recent CM9 binary). Busybox will allow you to do things like remount /system and other necessary shell commands after the temporary ro.secure=0 boot up. This might also be a good time to push bash, or whatever linux utilities you’d like to have.
- *OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED* — adb install the default Browser.apk from your good source, such as CM9. No browser is on the Q by default. Chrome will work, so will Firefox. Adobe Flash works (very well) with the CM9 Browser.apk in stock ICS on the Q.
- *OPTIONAL* — Install gapps, just like you would via clockworkmod. Hell CWM maybe out there for all I know. I did it manually, pushing the libs/apks/etc to the right places on /system. Gmail/Play/Youtube all work.
- Sideload/Install a Launcher, I choose Trebuchet, also from nightly CM9 Doubleshot. adb install the apk, it will work.
- *OPTIONAL*. (Not really necessary because later we will put Google Play on it and make Google Play show us any app we want) — Sideload as many apks as you like for testing. I was lazy, and grabbed my apps from my Doubleshot /data/app directory. I then did a simple scripted command to install them all. ‘for i in *.apk ; do adb install $i ; done’.