Friday, January 1, 2016

Happy New Year!

Hope we all have a happy and joyous New Year.

My wife gave me a nice little Polaroid 10.1" Android tablet for Christmas, and I gave her a Liberty Cross from the Liberty Rings Company, along with a nice silver chain, and a gift card to Macy's, her favorite place to shop.

One of the projects for the coming year is to figure out how to get root access to the tablet, which is running Android 5.0.1 "Lollipop", and so far, all I've managed to do is lock it up hard enough that I had to do a "reset and restore" back to the OEM image.

5.0.1 isn't the newest Android version, but it's new enough, and this tablet is obscure enough, that I haven't been able to find a pre=packaged app to root it.

And the "allow installation of apps from unknown sources" selector is greyed-out, so the apps I have been able to find from "unknown sources" (i.e., NOT from the Google Play Store) so I can't go that route.

Time to brush up my hack-foo skills, I guess!

***UPDATE*** 

Turns out that if you go to Settings/About Tablet and tap the "Build Number" entry about 7 times, you get elevated to "Developer" status.

Then going to Settings/Security, and tapping the "Unknown Sources" entry several times, it pops up with a warning, which you tap "OK", and the control is no longer grayed-out.

So, I can now install the apps needed to root the tablet, and even access the bootloader if I want to change the ROM to something like ParanoidAndroid or Cyanogen.

1 comment:

  1. Physicist, engineer, radio telecommunications expert, programmer, hacker...there is no end to your talents.

    ReplyDelete

Keep it civil, please....

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