Last week, I dropped my OnePlus One phone. The touch screen broke, and stopped working. Eventually, I will buy a new phone, but for the time being, my father gave me his old Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100. It was running Android 2.something, so I decided to upgrade it to Cyanogenmod 13 (which uses Android 6.0).

I had some troubles with using the Cyanogenmod wiki, so I used googles cache. It took me more than a day to realize that Cyanogenmod seems to have ceised existing. So I guess this was the last time I installed CyanogenMod. But nevertheless, let's document how I did it, because it was way more difficult than I expected it to be.

I am using Fedora 24. I think I installed adb as follows:

yum install android-tools

The installation of CyanogenMod 13 itself is well documented in the wiki, but I had some troubles using heimdall to flash a new recovery image. The error message was:

Partition "kernel" does not exist in the specified PIT.

I was using the 'zImage' from the tar-file I downloaded using the direct download link on the wiki page.

What I had to do, was unplug the device, reboot it into download mode, plug it in again and then I had to enter:

heimdall flash --KERNEL zImage --no-reboot

So KERNEL should be in all caps, but it was really necessary to unplug, reboot, and replug. Which I found out after way to many tries.

When the new kernel/recovery was installed, I booted into recovery, and I was able to install the latest nightly (ever as it seems) using adb sideload.

But then I wanted to install the Google Apps, and even though I downloaded the 'pico' version of Open GApps, my device complained about not enough space availabe. (Error 70 or something.) So I had to repartition the device, in order to increase the size of the system partition.

I needed a Windows PC to accomplish that, and I followed more or less what's on this thread on XDA-developers.

I downloaded Odin v3.07 from this very page, and the zip with pit-files as well. I don't like it at all to download software from a random forum thread, but I really got desparate, and I was happy it eventually worked. I needed to install the drivers for the phone as well, but those I downloaded from samsungdrivers.net. (Not sure that's an official site, but some firewall blocked the zip-file with the drivers from the forum posts.)

Now if I remember it correctly, I used Odin with the pit file I9100_1GB-System_3GB-Data_512MB-Preload.pit file to change the partitions on my phone. To be fair, I was just guessing. I didn't flash a kernel using odin, because I got an error message.

So after repartitioning, I re-flashed the recovery image with heimdall, I reformatted the internal sd card in recovery mode, and then I sideloaded CyanogenMod again, and the pico-image of OpenGapps.

And it worked. For the last time. I guess I'll keep an eye on Lineage OS and Dirty Unicorns.