There are a couple of ways to get root access on the Advent Vega but it’s useful to understand how to do it with ADB, the Android Debug Bridge which forms part of the Android SDK.
Enabling root on the Advent Vega will void the warranty apparently, however you can always flash back to the stock rom. If you don’t understand exactly what root/rooting an Android device is you can read more about it here
First you will need to install ADB, part of the Android SDK. It’s in the Android SDK Starter Package in a tools directory. Grab the latest one here and unzip it to somewhere safe on your PC. In the Android\Platform-tools directory you’ll find ADB. This is a command line application that allows you to connect and talk to your Android device, in our case the Advent Vega.
Testing that everything is set up and ready to go is easy, here’s how…
- First browse on your Advent Vega to Settings.
- Tap into Applications.
- Tap into Development.
- Make sure USB Debugging is ticked/active.
- Plug your Advent Vega into your computer.
- Open up a command prompt (dos box/terminal window)
- Browse on your computer to the location of ADB
- Type adb devices and press enter (on Mac you need to prefix adb with ./ so it’s always going to be ./adb devices etc)
- You should see a list of attached devices, if not then refer here to make sure you have the right drivers installed. Also ensure you are not in USB Storage mode.
Ok, that’s the ADB setup and ready to rock. Now we are going to use that to install a couple of things to do the actual rooting for us. Don’t worry, you’re clever and this will be no problem for you, the hard part is complete already.
We need to download these two packages next;
These need to be unzipped into the Android\Platform-tools folder from the Android SDK. We’ll put them in there so that if we do this again we know where they are.
- Make sure your Advent Vega is connected via USB, do not have USB Storage turned on.
- Go back to your computers prompt / terminal window (you didn’t close that did you?) you need to type the following lines, one at a time and press enter after each one.
adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp
adb shell
chmod 755 /data/local/tmp/rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin
/data/local/tmp/rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin
Leave that until it’s finished running and then type the following lines into your command prompt/terminal windows
exitadb kill-server
adb start-server
adb shell
Now you should see the prompt on the session change to a ‘#’, if you don’t see this then you need to repeat the previous steps. If you did you can continue to type each of these lines in order, pressing return after each one as before.
mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
exitadb push su /system/xbin
adb shell chmod 4755 /system/xbin/su
adb push Superuser.apk /system/app
You now know how to root your Advent Vega Android Tablet. Congratulations! You’ll notice you have a new app on your device called SuperUser, this tracks which apps you have given root access to in the past, saving you from having to give it every time. A word of warning though, if you give an app root access it can literally do ANYTHING to your device. I will accept no responsibility for doing this with our device, you need to decide if this is something you really need. In closing, Google placed the application restrictions in Android for a reason. It’s up to you what you do with rooting.
Have fun!
