Ubuntu – How to update meizu pro 5

I have been experiencing the same issues as you with my mobile data on my bq Aquaris E5 (which is also running OTA-11). I have raised this before here, under the following question Ubuntu Touch - Mobile Data becoming increasingly unusable I have not decided to flush the phone as yet, but can understand your thought process behind doing that. For me, my wife is on the same network and if I have no signal, she always has one on her Samsung S5. I get better coverage on 2G. I have also found that if I turn the phone to flight mode and then back again, the mobile data works for a bit and then seems to time out. If I go on to a webpage and then refresh it, the Internet seems to come on, like it is sleeping without any activity. However, if this is the case certain things do not seem to wake it up like new Telegram messages and such like.

Not possibly the answer you were looking for, but at least you know that you are not the only one with this issue. I will be raising this in Launchpad shortly.

I solved the problem with some hacky workarounds, but it works. Might not be the best way to solve the problem though. I got the answer by following some parts of @steeldriver's comment and adding some of my own.

First you need to download the .deb file for tar.

Go to you Downloads folder, by using the command

cd ~/Downloads/

and then doing

ls | grep tar

to make sure the download succeeded. You should get an output similar to

tar_1.27.1-1ubuntu0.1_i386.deb

If not, you should try downloading again.

_{I'm going to use the name mytar.deb for the answer, but replace that with the real name of your .deb file}

Now, you need to extract the contents of the .deb file without using tar.

First do

ar x mytar.deb

which will extract the files from the archive into the current directory. To list the files present, do

ar t mytar.deb

which will output something similar to

debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.xz

data.tar.xz contains the actual files which we need to copy. We cannot use tar to extract them because our current computer does not have the tar command.

First lets convert data.tar.xz to data.tar. To do this, do

xz -dc < data.tar.xz > data.tar

which should create a new file data.tar.

Now, we need to create a link to busybox as mentioned by @steeldriver in the comments. So do

sudo ln -s /bin/busybox /usr/local/bin/tar

to create a symlink.

Then, you basically are using busybox instead of tar. So if you use the command tar, it invokes busybox instead. Now do

mkdir temp

to create a dummy directory. Then

tar -xf data.tar -C temp/

to extract the .tar file and dump its contents in the directory temp. Change the working directory to temp by using

cd temp

Then do,

ls -pal

to get an output like

total 28
drwxrwxr-x  5 ashish ashish  4096 Jan 11 08:41 ./
drwxr-xr-x 23 ashish ashish 12288 Jan 11 08:41 ../
drwxr-xr-x  2 ashish ashish  4096 Jan 11 08:41 bin/
drwxr-xr-x  2 ashish ashish  4096 Jan 11 08:41 etc/
drwxr-xr-x  5 ashish ashish  4096 Jan 11 08:41 usr/

If you do not get the folders like bin, etc, and usr, you have made some mistake.

Now, you can just copy all the files in those folders to the actual destinations (/bin/tar, /usr/local/bin/tar etc), and then do

tar --help

If you get an output showing the commands of tar, it works!

Now do

sudo apt-get install --reinstall tar

which should reinstall tar. If it gives you an error saying to run apt-get -f install, do that and then reinstall tar, it worked for me on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.