Heimdall - Flashing Samsung Galaxy S Series ROM in Ubuntu Made Easy!

If you own a Samsung S series tablet PC or a smart phone then I'm pretty sure you can find a "decent" GUI to flash new ROM updates (yikes) in MS Windows platform. But what if you use GNU/Linux... say Ubuntu for instance, wouldn't you like to flash your Samsung Galaxy S series while using your Ubuntu Laptop??

If so then then the Xda geeks have an excellent opensource application called Heimdall that does exactly that!. Unlike many other tools this opensource app run in GNU/Linux, MS Windows and Mac OSX as well.

It has two main version (before you panic, they're both free :P). One version is a command-line tool without any GUI... but the other is a graphical frond-end that uses the command-line tool (written in Qt toolkit I assume).

Main features...

*. According to the developer they've tested in various Galaxy S variants such as - GT-I9000, GT-I9000, AT & T Captivate, Vibrant Bell, Telstra I9000T-GT, and the Epic 4G Galaxy Tab and in all those occasions Heimdall has done its duty quite well and seems to have a 100% success rate!.

*. Load the ROM file and it'll show various info such as the Version, Platform, and supported devices, etc.

*. Repartition if necessary.

*. Showing the progress.

But please remember. While using it do not remove the USB cables which will result in a ROM flash/update failure resulting in a non-usable Galaxy S device :/. Also make sure you have a power backup generator (UPS devices, etc).

And lastly even though this has a 100% success rate yet there's no guarantee that it'll work 100% for you and both the developer and myself do not hold any responsibilities for damages that could occur in your Galaxy S ROM flashing procedure.

You can get the latest update 1.3 (still in beta) from this Xda forum thread. Oh one more thing, when downloading choose "Heimdall-Frontend" if you want the GUI instead of the command-line tool.

While I was installing Heimdall 1.3 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal I also had to manually install a Qt-4 XML library using the below command. Your Ubuntu installation may have it already but after installing if you couldn't run it then use the below command.

sudo apt-get install libqtxml4-perl

After installing, just press "Alt" + "F2" and put the below command and it should run automatically. 

heimdall-frontend

So if you've been wanitng to flash your Galaxy S tablet/smart-phone in Ubuntu, then Heimdall is the one you should be talking to :). I hope this works for you. Good luck.