I896

My condition seems fairly unique:

• Samsung Captivate (Model i896)
• Rogers Wireless (Canada)
• OSX (mac air, too small to install bootcamp)

Reference URLs (nothing verified working!)

• Secret codes
• XDA Forums
• XDA Wiki
• One Click Unlock

Steps that worked for me

• Reference URL for Installing Clockwork Recovery Mod on OSX
• Download kernel image

$ tar xvf captivate-recovery-cwm5-kernel.tar

• Start cellphone in download mode by holding volume down, power on, and plugging in the USB. Note: You have to have USB debugging turned on in system settings!

$ heimdall flash --kernel zImage

If you go on to "Method via Recovery", you might get what I did, in that right after starting step 9, it looks like it's getting ready to install the zip file:

Checking the state of BML/MTD...

after that, my phone with start to boot scroll by for about 4 seconds, and reboot in a loop. I re-entered Recovery mode, went to advanced, and chose to "Report error". from there on my osx machine:

adb pull /sdcard/clockworkmod/recovery.log

the last line of my log file showed:

I:Checking for extendedcommand...
I:Skipping execution of extendedcommand, file not found...

it seems that either my /data or /cache were corrupted, so simply wiping them wasn't enough. In recovery I went to mount options, and formatted both of these directories. Then I attempted to install the CM update.zip once again, this time with success!

rooting the phone with Skyrocket

• Download the rootkit here
• Be sure to add the "$adb wait-for-device" line as documented, to avoid the "Error: device not found" error.

Stock Rogers Wireless image

I needed to go back to the stock Rogers Wireless image on osx. I downloaded the stock image, and ran heimdall in download mode:

$ heimdall flash --primary-boot boot.bin --cache cache.rfs  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs  --secondary-boot Sbl.bin --kernel zImage --verbose

Recovery Mode

Settings -> About Phone -> Build Number -> Gingerbread*

If you see this, you probably have noticed that when you boot in Recovery mode, it's using Android 3e, which requires the zip files to be digitally signed. If you try and install a zip file not signed, you'll get an error:

E: signature verification failed

In order to resolve this, install something like Clockwork Recovery, which allows you to turn off signature checking.

Outstanding issues

I can't seem to find a way to root this phone using OSX:

• If the One Click Root guy is reading this, please add "I896" to the models you search for, this model is missing.
• If the heimdall guy is reading this, on OSX I get "Tar header contained and invalid file size" for every package I try to open.