re-flashing a German A780

[MAPGPS]

Does anyone have experience on re-flashing a German A780 to other firmware?
I want to buy a German A780 (as it is offical announced to have built-in GPS chipset), but I'm afraid it can't be re-flashed to support other language, such as Chinese.

URL: www.motorolafans.com/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1552&highlight=RSA]RSA signature protection in MOTO firmware[/url]

Maybe re-flash the language package is enough?

[samr7]

You should be able to install a different language pack on top of the European firmware. The language pack is a standard cramfs image mounted on /usr/language. If it were easy to extract CG35 from an SHX file that has the language you want, you could do that and flash only that part using PST.

Otherwise, the language pack can be copied and overwritten from a shell if you can get telnet or qonsole access. It resides on the pseudo block device /dev/tffsa, and its size depends on your kernel, usually 12MB or 20MB. You can easily "dd" it to or from a file in /diska while the phone is running, but you'll probably want to reboot afterwards.

It is not simple to extract the langauge pack image from an SHX, nor to create an SHX section for the language pack out of an existing cramfs image. The issue is the TrueFFS wear-evening technology, another closed source piece of crap. TrueFFS maintains a proprietary file format on an underlying raw flash device, and appears as a linear block device to Linux through the tffs.o kernel module and /dev/tffsX. You can write a specific block offset on /dev/tffsa millions of times and it will ensure that the underlying flash chip doesn't exceed its rewrite cycle count for any single block. This is great, but makes no sense for cramfs images. It does make sense for the FAT32 filesystem residing on /dev/tffsb that is accessed through USB mass storage, however.

The problem with TrueFFS is that when PST goes to rewrite the language pack section of the flash, it writes directly to the underlying flash chip, and must fill it with data in the TrueFFS proprietary format, not the raw cramfs image format, otherwise TrueFFS won't be able to make heads or tails out of the partition. This is why CG35 is scrambled and unreadable in SHX files.

I have rewritten the language pack on my A780 to get rid of China Mobile branding from some other firmware, and was quite successful using the shell technique.

Between TrueFFS, VFM/HatCreek, and the BP flex file system, there appear to be three independent flash wear-evening technologies used on this device. Ouch!

[DrCraq]

Hi there.

Just wondering if you had success in "installing" the chinese language support "over" the german phone. I also have the wish to be able to write chinese charakters with this phone.

Can you give me any infos if it worked with your phone?
Thanx in advance