As a previous post here testifies, I bought a Dragon Touch X10 tablet almost 3 years ago. I went from being thrilled with my purchase, to being appalled at how sub-standard the Android OS really is - at least Android's 4.4.x (Kitkat) to 5.1.0 (Lollipop) anyway!
Fast forward, a few months, I discovered that despite the rhetoric from 'official' sources, an 'un-rooted' Android sucks - there are just too many 'interesting' apps that require a rooted OS to work properly. Enter Kingo rooting.
This was a god-send, or so I thought, when I originally went that route (sic). With little effort, I ended up with a rooted X10, and with no apparent down-side - ie. everything worked as expected. Fast-forward another year, something fatally screwed up my tablet's OS, to the point that it would no longer even boot. After freshly re-installing Android, rooting seemed a pre-requisite, so back to Kingo I went. This time however, although I ended up with a rooted device, also included was a load of obtrusive crap that made the gains pale in comparison - the tablet powering on & off to load ads, when on charge, every minute or so, was the deal-breaker - one fresh Android install later, I was back with a unrooted X10.
But the thing that really sucked about Kingo was, part of the rooting process required that it be installed on Windows (Win7 in my case) first, and immediately on doing so, Windows would puke up a "...not genuine" error - and nothing could correct this problem. Hell, I even reinstalled Windows/Kingo twice just to be sure that it was Kingo that was responsible - it was! So yeah, KINGO SUCKS!!!
But even back then, there was another 'solution' available for rooting the X10, but it seemed way too complicated. For one, the initial step recommended that BBQLinux be installed, as this included many Android-development tools. Being the lesser of two (Kingo) evils, I decided to go this route, but was disgusted to find that after the installation, the BBQLinux 'rolling-release' encountered an error when I tried to update it. Dejected, there things lay, until now...
Fast-forward to today, I decided to have another go rooting the X10. My main fear all along was that 'flashing' it manually would 'brick' the tablet. Two years on, I no longer cared too much if that occurred, particularly since despite almost no use, the screen had developed a fault - a single line of pixels, from top to bottom, are permanently switched on.
The only thread I've found that deals specifically with rooting the Dragon Touch X10 tablet is available here. My first attempt resulted in failure, though thankfully, didn't result in a bricked device. The error I made was in not following the instructions 'to the letter'. I had seen that, viewed from Linux, the X10 partition type was a "mmcblkxx' type. Based on this, I flashed - apparently, successfully! - the X10 with the recovery boot-loader 'TWRP'. On rebooting the X10 however, nothing appeared to have changed - I booted to the same screen that the X10 had always booted to in recovery mode. It was only as an afterthought, when I checked the X10's partition-type from the ADB console (check the link provided) that I was stunned to discover that my X10's partition type was not 'mmcblkxx' but 'nand'.
Reflashing the X10 with the alternative TWRP 'nand' image file, then rebooting, produced a very different result - ie. the new TWRP recovery bootloader! All that was then necessary was to use it to flash the SuperSU (linked-to from site) file to the tablet. And Presto - one Rooted-device!!!
The one other thing I discovered while doing this, and what prompted me to make this post, was that there is no need to install BBQLinux 'just' to root the X10. Even my ancient Mint 17.3 (as well as Deepin 15.8) has the required ADB-tools in their repositories, needing just a few hundred KB's of downloads to achieve the same results.
