HowTo manually upgrade the Moto G to Android 4.4 in Germany and Austria

Just today I read that it is easily possible to manually force the Moto G to a system update to get Android 4.4. All you need is to put the signed installer package on your phone under /sdcard/ and the Moto G will automatically move the files into the system memory and perform the upgrade.

So follow these steps:

1. Download the upgrade package from here: http://d-h.st/JRE
2. Move it to /sdcard/ either when plugged into your computer or with a file-manager
3. Go to Settings -> About phone -> System Updates
4. You will be asked to push the files into the systems memory and the update will begin

The installer package I linked above is a Germany/Austria specific package, I don't know if it will work for other countries too. If you current version in Settings -> About Phone -> System Version is also *falcon_umts.Retail.en.DE it will work for sure. If you have links for other builds, please leave a comment.

Have fun with Android 4.4!

How to manually install the OpenVPN binary

It seems that since the upgrade to Android 4.3 the OpenVPN Installer App is not working for me any more. I get some error saying /system cannot be mounted writeable (rw).
However, it is still possible to install the openvpn binary per hand... and it is not as complicated as it seems! This guide only works on rooted devices and is written for Linux users, however the lower part should also work on Windows and Mac.

At first you need to get the Android Debug Bridge binary and install it on your computer (I just put it into $HOME/bin).
Then download the latest OpenVPN Installer APK - we need to extract the openvpn binary from this package:

wget http://android-openvpn-installer.googlecode.com/files/OpenVPN-Installer-0.2.4.apk

To extract the xbin-binary, you can use FileRoller on Gnome or any other tool. Here is an example of how do it with the terminal only:

unzip OpenVPN-Installer-0.2.4.apk assets/openvpn-2.1.1-static-xbin
mv assets/openvpn-2.1.1-static-xbin openvpn
rm -r assets

Now use adb to push the binary to your phone/tablet's "sdcard" (external storage):

adb push openvpn /sdcard/

The next two commands will open a shell and give us root access on your Android device. Everything you type afterwards happens directly on your device, so be careful!

adb shell
su

Now we need to mount /system as writeable to be able to make changes. Next we copy the binary to its final location and delete it on the sdcard (unfortunately moving is not possible). After we changed the file-permissions so that the binary can be executed, we need to mount /system as read-only again:

mount -o remount rw /system
cp /sdcard/openvpn /system/xbin/
rm /sdcard/openvpn
chmod 755 /system/xbin/openvpn
mount -o remount ro /system

Everything should be done now. Close the connection to your device by typing exit two times and try to use OpenVPN Settings! The installer app will also show you "Binary installed" if everything worked!

Android Camera App complains "Please insert an SD card..."

Today my Android phone running Oxygen Rom 2.3 could not make photos any more. A error message appeared on opening the camera app: "Please insert an SD card before using the camera", although the sd card was present and also detected by the system.

When mounting it on my Linux system, I could not delete any files and the error appeared: "read-only file system".
A little research revealed, my fat32 filesystem got corrupt somehow, but this can be easily fixed:

sudo fsck.vfat /dev/mysdcard -v -r

(please unmount the partition before and change /dev/mysdcard to the value of your device! you can see all your mounted partitions with running the "df" command!)

On Windows, there might also be a button somewhere saying "Repair File-System".
Mount SD card, boot the phone and it should be fixed!