Droid X manual update to leaked 2.2

zeiroe — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:37:56 +0000

So it seems that there are a few that still want to know how to upgrade their Droid X to 2.2. We’ve all seen the Motorola post attempting to discourage people from using the leaked version of 2.2. … No one cares. There is always a way to upgrade … Sanctioned or not.

If you can’t wait for Motorola to drop the official 2.2 update (they’ve been wrong about update releases before) and you understand the risk you are taking … then proceed with the following:

** Not responsible if you break/brick your device or if your dog gets diarrhea**

Download the gift that was released from mydroidworld.com here
Copy the update.zip file to the root of your sdcard and shut down your Droidx.
Restart your Droidx in the recovery console … Power+Home until you see the moto logo.
Once in recovery, press your search button to bring up the recovery options. Use volume to navigate the menu and the camera to confirm a selection.
Select apply update.zip and have fun … the update.zip already has flash 10.1 included.

Skype with wifi calling support yay … wait wut?!

zeiroe — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:07:01 +0000

Oh boy! Looks like Skype was updated recently to allow calls over WiFi. Oh the joy! The innovation! The convenience! The … wait wut? This had the potential to be huge. , now for the fail detail.

You still need to have a cellular signal just to login to Skype. If you are in the basement of a 16 story building that doesn’t get reception, this update probably doesn’t do you any good … Even if you “has the WiFis” down there. It still needs a cell signal to authenticate who your carrier is and your phone number. You might be able to get away with running outside to authenticate then run back into the building … might … but I doubt it.

Second fail I noticed. Even though you are calling through “the WiFis”, It’s still counted against your regular minutes according to your plan. That awards the new and improved Skype android app for Verizon a “Double Failbow” in my book. Full on double failbow all the way.

Source: androidcentral.com

How to downgrade and root your DInc from 2.2

zeiroe — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:07:32 +0000

I had a buddy that wanted to test out the leaked Droid Incredible froyo RUU … The 3.21.605.1 RUU with the 2.15 radio. Problem was that he quickly found out that he lost root and his clockwork recovery. The race condition that allowed you to pop in an sdcard had been fixed and unrevoked’s root and reflash utility didn’t work on this new leak. It was also pretty safe to say that any future shipments of DInc’s would have this type of load as well by default. Oh noes!

Fortunately we have an exploding community. Forumite smwoodward posted a guide on xda-developers.com to roll back your Radio, HBOOT and OS. With his guide, you can install the rom.zip file for any RUU applicable to your DInc. Seems smwoodward saw that the EVO users were in the same boat in the past and the same fix for them applies to the DInc. This fix should also apply to any new DInc’s that come to stores with 2.2 already installed.

Unfortunately, smwoodward didn’t have enough posts under his belt to post links in his thread. It was kind of hard to follow without working links. Here’s my reiteration of this fix:

** Not responsible if you break/brick your device or if your dog gets diarrhea. This guide was written assuming you have a basic understanding of ADB and it is required that your SDcard be formatted in FAT32**

If you haven’t already, download the Android SDK here. Extract it to the root of your C: drive.
Download the downgrade files here mirror. The zip contains 3 files. Extract those 3 files into the tools directory of the SDK folder. Should be “c:\android-sdk-windows\tools”.
Download the PB31IMG.zip file here. Place this file in your “c:\android-sdk-windows\tools” directory. This was originally the rom.zip file found within the DInc’s RUU for 1.22.605.2_Radio_1.00.03.04.06_hboot_0.79_release_161494. I renamed it to PB31IMG.zip. This will be the file that the bootloader will look for. More on that later.
With your phone on, plugged into your computer and “USB Debugging” enabled (Settings > Applications > Development > USB Debugging), open a cmd prompt and type

cd C:\android-sdk-windows\tools

Once ready, type these commands in cmd prompt from your adb tools directory. After every line press enter.

adb push flash_image /data/local/
adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp/
adb push mtd0.img /sdcard/
adb push PB31IMG.zip /sdcard/

Note: the PB31IMG.zip will take longer than expected to transfer to the sdcard. It is a BIG file.

Now we chmod a few things. After every line press enter. It should repeat what you typed in and then return you to a blank line with an $ for everything in adb shell

adb shell
cd /data/local/tmp
chmod 0755 /data/local/tmp/rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin
cd /data/local
chmod 0755 /data/local/flash_image
cd /data/local/tmp
./rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin

Note: You will now see some text on your cmd prompt screen explaining the exploit.

Wait for the adb shell to go away, and it will dump you into your windows command prompt again (no shell) should look something like this: “C:\android-sdk-windows\tools>”
Typing adb shell now should produce a # prompt.

cd /data/local
./flash_image misc /sdcard/mtd0.img

that will flash your misc partition with Toast’s mtd-eng.img. Once completed, This should return you to a blank line with #.

reboot bootloader

This will reboot your device into the bootloader and start to automatically install the PB31IMG.zip file you pushed on to your sdcard. The load process will take a little while.
After a minute or so, there should be a prompt on your DInc’s screen asking if you want to apply the update. Press the volume up key to confirm. This will take a while. Your phone will reboot a couple of times during this process. Just let it sit. There will be a confirmation message once its done.
Congrats! You are now rolled back to 2.1. Your HBOOT is rolled back prior to the race condition fix. Downloading the unrevoked root and reflash utility and running it will root your DInc and install the latest clockwork recovery.

Source: xda-developers.com

CyanogenMod 6 officially lands on Rom Manager

zeiroe — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 04:51:14 +0000

Quick blog post for those that follow. Just saw a series of tweets from @ChrisSoyars indicating to check RomManager. I’ve been a rabid fan of the nightly builds and two thing that I’ve been waiting for was compcache and apps2ext … Quickly looking over the features of CM6, I don’t see either of those in this build. More than likely it will be in future releases. The absence if compcache and apps2ext is by far not a deal breaker. I love CyanogenMod and all the small tweaks they do to the OS as a whole. Tried the stock droid FRG22D build and could only take it for a day. I quickly developed a spastic neck twitch missing my CM6. For a list of features, check their changelog here

Source: @ChrisSoyars

MyDroidWorld to leak a signed Droid X froyo update … within 24 hours?

zeiroe — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:16:53 +0000

I love these guys. They were the first to deliver froyo on the moto droid and from what I can tell by this thread that P3Droid made, this just might be a signed zip that your unrooted and stock Droid X can “apply update.zip”. Forum followers are all indicating that you need to be stock to apply this. That means to put back that bloatware and undo any custom hackery you applied for custom notification bars and themes. Now I should be able to get my wife off my back about getting flash installed on her phone. =D

Source: MyDroidWorld.com

CyanogenMod 6 nightlies have the latest google goodies

zeiroe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:43:41 +0000

Since Google’s big announcement about the improvements in its android search and voice applications, I’ve been dying to try it out. CyanogenMod is my droids rom of choice, particularly the nightlies. Unfortunately, the market would fail to install the voice and search updates. I could not get those 2 applications to update in my market app. Today, I was doing my hourly OCD refresh of market. You know … just to see if any apps had an update available. That’s when I noticed that the voice and search apps were already installed. Holy cow! I didn’t manually install this from the market. Did the nightly download of the gapps from rom manager have anything to do with it? Sure nuff. Looking at the experimental section of cyanogenmod.com, quite a few android devices had their FRF91 google apps updated yesterday.

I did find one bug and a fix. I must have had a Jedi or Sith Lord stuck in my phone for a bit. He kept force closing the voice app when entering additional lines in my email. Not a problem. Manually downloading the appropriate experimental FRF91 google app pack from cyanogenmod and installing it via rom manager made all the difference. So if you have koush’s premium rom manager and are not afraid to navigate around the dark side of the force … then what are you waiting for?

CM6 nightlies can be manually downloaded from here.
The FRF91 google app pack here. (Need to be registered to download)

How to unroot your EVO 4G

zeiroe — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:46:17 +0000

So I had a co-worker that got an EVO 4G. Unfortunately he was still in a contract with the android hating carrier known as AT&T. He wanted to see what he was missing all the while taking advantage of the 30 day return policy. First thing he does once we get back to the office from the lunch time purchase was hand me the phone to root. All I could offer at the time was wireless tether but I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to hack away at another phone that I never touched before. It was easy enough to root … Many have done so with the reflash app created by the awesome devs at unrevoked.com … If you’ve been to the site to download, you can see what 5 phones this rooting application applies to.

Needless to say, I had to unroot and bring his phone back to stock. Understandably, he couldn’t keep up with 3 lines on AT&T and his own line on Sprint. Searched as I may, I could not find a quick writeup on how to truly unroot (recovery partition and all) and bring back to stock. This is what drove me to write one up myself. If all you’ve done is ran the reflash app to gain root and change the recovery … then proceed with the following:

Download the latest reflash untility from unrevoked.com
Download the stock EVO recovery.img … The one I’m providing was extracted from the Supersonic_1.32.651.1_Radio_1.39.00.04.26_release_171253 RUU.
Boot your phone into the recovery console and connect it to your computer.
Mount the system partition
adb shell
rm /system/bin/su
rm /system/app/Superuser.apk
unmount the system partition, unplug your phone and reboot your phone back into the full OS.

Start the reflash utility but make sure your phone is not plugged in. It should give a status that its waiting for your device to be plugged in.
Click on File and Custom Recovery. Point it to the recovery.img file that I liked earlier.
The bottom of the window should change from Clockwork Recovery to Custom.
Now plug your phone in and let reflash do its magic. Once its completed, congrats.

You will still need to manually uninstall your applications that take advantage of root like wifi tether or root explorer.

Mangler … The ventrilo client for android

zeiroe — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:49:09 +0000

Here’s a fabulous app that I stumbled upon while sitting in California traffic this afternoon. I play games … MMO’s, FPS’s, RTS’s … everything. I’ve wondered if there was a ventrilo application for android phones. So many times I wanted to listen in on how a raid was going or how someones 2v2′s were hashing out … Wanting to hear the guild douche scream that theres an aimbot on the server or just chatting with friends.

Well my friends we have such an app and its called Mangler. Its surfaced back around when the moto droid launched and its still in its alpha release. In my honest opinion, its a solid working beta to me. The only issues I’ve seen is that I had a force close once after configuring to connect to my vent server … But after relaunching, it went right in. Another issue is that it doesn’t like being navigated away from. It will FC if you go to another app with it running. It works in standby as you can put it an and bring it back out of standby w/o issues. Other than that, it works great for my froyo’d moto droid running BB v0.4.

direct download

Source: Mangler.org

Review of SetCPU 2.0.0-beta1

zeiroe — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 06:24:02 +0000

This is going to be just a quick screenshot review of our beloved SetCPU. Looks the the dev of SetCPU finally got around to responding to the beta requests he asked for No worries. As I was getting this post ready he already sent out a beta2 update. Wowzers. He’s working fast. Since this is a paid app that everyone should gladly pay for, I cannot post the link or apk. This isn’t a warez blog.

For the most part, in his email, the major change will be the UI. You can see it looks a great deal better from the screenies below. My main concern was will it work with my droid running a froyo rom (Kanerade v1.1) with a 32 kernel … yes my friends … It does. =D

Problems updating google maps to 4.3 with froyo? Heres the fix.

zeiroe — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:55:59 +0000

So a few of my friends that have froyo loaded on their phones are having issues with updating their google maps app through the android market. It fails to install the update and it looks like the market doesn’t even register that its installed … But the old version still works.

Here’s what you do. All of my friends already have the android SDK installed on their computers so I assume you do to. Plug your droid into your computer. Do not mount the SDcard. Make sure debugging is enabled and run these commands:

adb shell

su

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 dev/block/mtdblock4 system

busybox rm system/app/Maps.apk

cd system/bin

sh pm uninstall com.google.android.apps.maps

cd ..

cd ..

mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 dev/block/mtdblock4 system

sync

After you do all this, you will be able to go back into the android market and install that google maps update with no problems.

Source: Droid-Life