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.

  1. Do the prerequisites
  2. Connect PC to Q via USB.
  3. 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.
  4. Run ‘adb reboot bootloader’
  5. Run ‘fastboot oem unlock’. Then (Within 5 seconds run this to confirm): ‘fastboot oem unlock_accept’.
  6. 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.
  7. Setup USB Debugging in Nexus Q via client app all over again (may require clearing data from client device Nexus Q app).
  8. Run ‘adb reboot bootloader’
  9. Run ‘fastboot boot nexusq-boot.img’. Your Nexus Q will now boot up unlocked, allowing:
  10. Run ‘adb remount’
  11. 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).
  12. *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.
  13. *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.
  14. *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.
  15. Sideload/Install a Launcher, I choose Trebuchet, also from nightly CM9 Doubleshot. adb install the apk, it will work.
  16. *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’.
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