Max Glenister

Tinkering • 3 min read Plain text

Ubuntu (native) on the Nexus 7

Last week, a Ubuntu native installer for the Nexus 7 was released, along with instructions on how to install Ubuntu on the Nexus 7. The plan is that the Nexus 7 will be the ‘core’ device that Canonical will build their tablet version of Ubuntu around. Right now, it’s quite experimental – the interface sees no tweaks for the tablet interface, beyond having an onscreen keyboard available.

The installation instructions I mentioned earlier are explicitly for installing Ubuntu on your Nexus 7 from an existing Ubuntu 12.10 install on your computer. Now, I don’t have any Ubuntu installations kicking around, so I can’t vouch for how well this process works, but there are plenty of videos around the internet already.

The installer just uses fastboot under a GUI, so we can get away with doing this from our Mac OS X terminal if we have the .img files required. Well, these can be acquired from this site, just select the appropriate storage size for your Nexus 7 (8GB or 16GB), and we’ll be ready to begin.

Here be dragons - Warning, this will wipe everything on your Nexus 7!

  1. Install fastboot/adb if they’re not already installed. You can use this simple script to do this - https://github.com/teamblueridge/adb-fastboot-install
  2. Connect your Nexus 7 by USB and boot it into fastboot mode (reboot holding vol - button)
  3. If you haven’t unlocked the bootloader on your Nexus 7 already, run fastboot oem unlock
  4. In the terminal, locate your downloaded image files, and execute the following:
$ fastboot flash boot boot.img
$ fastboot erase userdata
$ fastboot flash userdata rootfs.img
$ fastboot reboot

After that’s all finished, when your Nexus 7 boots it will take a couple of minutes to finalise the Ubuntu installation, so go make yourself some coffee or something. When you return, it should have loaded the Ubuntu Unity desktop. It’s usable with just the touch screen, but the experience isn’t great. You can join your Wifi network, install LXDE or XFCE or something, and log out and select a different desktop environment.

The password for the user account is ubuntu, though this wasn’t mentioned anywhere

But what about going back to Android?!

I didn’t keep Ubuntu on my Nexus 7 for very long. It’s not currently a great tablet experience, so here are the steps to reload Android on there:

  1. Download the Android 4.1.2 image for the Nexus 7 - https://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/nakasi-jzo54k-factory-973f190e.tgz
  2. Untar the file with tar -zxvf nakasi-jzo54k-factory-973f190e.tgz
  3. Open a terminal and cd to the extracted directory
  4. Run the flash-all.sh file: sh ./flash-all.sh
  5. (Optional) reflash a custom recovery fastboot flash recovery <custom-recovery>.img

I don’t think Ubuntu is a good fit for the Nexus 7 at the moment. If a nice tablet interface for Ubuntu is released it might be better, but in the mean time you’re probably better off keeping Android. There isn’t much else to say.

  • Tinkering · shares #guide
    CHIP Stuff

    This page is a changing document. I’ll probably add more notes to it in the future. These are just some notes that I’ve put together in the past about flashing and upgrading the CHIP (and Pocket CHIP) computer.

    February 2021 • 4 min read
  • Tinkering · shares #linux
    Installing Ubuntu on MacBookPro 8,2

    This MacbookPro8,2 has been through a lot. I did some small upgrades back in 2012, then in 2014 it experienced some issues with the dedicated GPU that many Macbook’s of this model experienced. For a while I managed to keep it running my forcefully disabling the dedicated GPU with some EFI trickery, and running some form of Linux for a while (I think I kept it going with Elementary OS). In 2016 (or there abouts) I took the drastic measure of baking the mainboard in the oven to fix the dedicated GPU issue (by reflowing/reballing the solder), reinstalled macOS and then (besides a short stint as my wife’s computer) the MacBookPro8,2 ended up back on a shelf. until today! out of boredom I’ve decided to revisit this old beast. Installing Ubuntu on my old early-2011 MacBookPro8,2 Install rEFInd - https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ Create a Ubuntu USB (I used Rufus on my Windows PC, with the Ubuntu 18.04.2 iso) Boot the iso (hold alt key to get the rEFInd menu, select the USB) And this is where the first headache is. To make Ubuntu play nicely, you need to edit the boot commands so that certain chipset features are poked and enabled. At the Ubuntu boot menu, select the option you want (e.g. Live installer) and press e, which will bring you to the editor. First disable the AMD graphics card by adding the following lines after set gfxpayload=keep outb 0x728 1 outb 0x710 2 outb 0x740 2 outb 0x750 0 Next add the following after quiet splash on the boot command: i915.lvds_channel_mode=2 i915.modeset=1 i915.lvds_use_ssc=0 Then press F10 to boot, and you should successfully boot to the Ubuntu installer. From here you can install Ubuntu. You can delete the macOS partitions if you like, just make sure you keep the ~200mb EFI partition, and create your Ubuntu partitions after that. You’ll need to do this again for your first boot after you’ve got Ubuntu installed, and then you can edit your Grub file permenantly using grub-customizer or something.

    April 2019 • 2 min read
  • Tinkering · shares #android
    Downgrading Nexus 5 from Android 6.0 to Android 5.1.1

    I jumped on Android 6.0 Marshmallow as soon as the developer images were available to flash, and to be honest as far as “major releases” go, it was pretty underwhelming. A lot of the new features aren’t things I need, and I’ve found myself running in to a bug with device orientation in Chrome (only!) not working.

    November 2015 • 2 min read

Discussion

No interactions yet

Join the conversation

Reply from your own site with a Webmention (how?).

Webmentions last fetched 12 November 2026, 12:24