How to install Plasma Mobile with MultiROM

MultiROM is useful for installing multiple ROM's on your android device, more information can be found on

You can also install multiple version of the Plasma Mobile, so this way you can keep one copy for development, and one copy which is stable to demonstrate and show off shiny plasma.

Tested devices

(If you test it with another devices please add it in following list)

LG Nexus 5 (hammerhead)

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you have kernel_kexec patch applied as mentioned in above links. You can skip installing MultiROM manager application and TWRP recovery for now. (Keep reading)

Install patched MultiROM manager

Currently MultiROM manager hard codes the image server to system-image.tasemnice.eu, However thanks to user @sedrubal on Github, MultiROM Manager is patched to use kubuntu.plasma-mobile.org instead of system-image.tasemnice.eu server.

Download APK from https://user.fablab.fau.de/~ev80uhys/multirommgr/ and install it using adb.

adb install «Path to com.tassadar.multirommgr.debug.apk»

Install Patched TWRP MultiROM recovery

MultiROM manager uses the patched TWRP recovery to finalize the installation of the operating systems. This recovery uses PGP keys to verify the Ubuntu touch images. However current recovery only have keys for the http://system-image.tasemnice.eu and http://system-image.ubports.com. So it also requires patching : Required patch is : https://github.com/Tasssadar/Team-Win-Recovery-Project/pull/16/

Since this is not merged yet, I have uploaded patched version at https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/OIgNSGoymLRyahg

Download it and flash it with fastboot.

adb reboot bootloader
fastboot flash recovery «path to twrp-kubuntu-keys-final.img»

Finally install the Plasma Phone

Reboot to normal Android, open MultiROM manager installed in earlier step. In the Ubuntu Card, select devel or devel-proposed and click on install..

It will take while to download. After download is over, it will reboot to recovery, in recovery it will make real installation process, so drink a coffee meanwhile.. ;-)

After that it is done installing it will reboot. Before android logo is shown it will ask you to choose from Internal or utouch_devel, Select utouch_devel to boot into your plasma.

Tips

Enabling developer mode

Enabling developer mode takes a little bit of extra effort, you will have to download unlocked adbd from http://people.canonical.com/~ogra/adbd and replace one in /usr/bin with it

wget http://people.canonical.com/~ogra/adbd
cp adbd /usr/bin/adbd
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/adbd