Heimdall is an open source replacement for the Samsung Galaxy S flashing utility called Odin. I like this because I can’t stand windows, so if I were to have “bricked” my Vibrant, I’d have been pretty well screwed until I found a friend with a windows machine. Now, there’s an option for us “regular” folks that don’t like to pay the microsoft tax just to use our hardware.
First things first, you’ll need some development packages, so run this command from the terminal:
sudo aptitude install build-essential libusb-1.0-0-dev
Next, you’ll need the hiemdall source from here. You’ll want to get the linux source archive.
Now unzip the source to a folder in your home directory, I use ~/source/. There should now be a folder called “Heimdall-Source”.
Change directories to Heimdall-Source and run the following commands:
./configure
make
sudo make install
You now have heimdall installed. The README file in the Heimdall-Source folder has information on use of the tool, but the important things to know are that you must run it with sudo, you’ll need to untar any .tar or .tar.md5 files you have in the odin bundle (tar xvf filename.tar), and include only the parameters from the source that match files you actually have in your odin tarball (if there’s no Spl.bin in your tarball, don’t include the “–secondary Sbl.bin” part of the heimdall command). If your odin bundle contains all of the files heimdall can use, your command would look like this:
sudo heimdall flash --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs --boot boot.bin --secondary Sbl.bin --param param.lfs --kernel zImage --modem modem.bin