(This requires SPRecovery 0.99.2b which I showed how to install thin the post about rooting and backing up your device. How to Root and Backup on your Droid)

The people over at Sholes.info have been working extremely hard on putting together the big features of Android 2.1 for the Motorola Droids (Sholes) with Andrioid 2.1 installed. Their work has come far and here is the result:

Introducing the brand spankin’ all-new Sholes.info ROM 1.0-RC1!!!

This combines the effort of all Sholes.info members including Berzerker, Birdman, and SirPsychoS. It’s been a few days in the works with existing ROM features + adding/upgrading other things in order to complete what our view was to be when it would be completed. This is the outcome, and we have to say, we’re pretty pleased with what we’ve come up with.

What is included in this ROM:

• OPTIMIZATION (all APKs and JARs in /system are fully optimized, to provide vast speed improvements)
• 2.1 Keyboard which includes Voice Dictation (ported by Berzerker)
• 2.1 Gallery app (credit to [mbm])
• 2.1 Music app (credit to jinx10000)
• 2.1 Clock app (replaces AlarmClock and the Multimedia Dock) (credit to jinx10000)
• 2.1 News/Weather Widget
• 2.1 Launcher (v1.1a (adds stability fixes)) (credit to xeudoxus)
• 2.0.1 Launcher (v1.1a (slightly smaller and includes auto-rotate w/ keyboard closed)) (credit to xeudoxus)
• Multi-Touch Browser (reverted back to stable lib file to remove bugs) (credit to t3hSteve)
• Brightness hack (includes app to edit brightness levels (credit to xeudous and jinx10000)
• YouTube HQ default hack
• Swype Keyboard
• WiFi-Tethering (additional setup required, instructions provided)
• Ability to remove potentially unwanted apps.

How to install:

(Note: DO NOT ATTEMPT to restore the .rom.tgz using backup/restore, you will fail/brick your phone)

(Note: This update REQUIRES (not “maybe I can get away with it”. ***REQUIRES***) sprecovery version 0.99.2b. It WILL NOT INSTALL unless you have this version installed (it will error with status 15 or 154.))

1. Update to the latest sprecovery using this guide if you haven’t done so already.
2. Download the ROM and place it in /sdcard (the root directory of it)
3. Reboot into sprecovery and choose “install”
4. Select “choose ROM from sdcard” and choose .rom.tgz (it’s the first option now in the install menu)
5. It will prompt you about whether or not to wipe /data. If you are installing over an existing installation of 2.1 or any ROM that is significantly different from stock 2.0.1, say yes. If you are installing over stock 2.0.1, over a previous version of Berzerker’s, birdman’s, or my ROM, you can safely select no.
6. It will automatically install OVER your existing image and not erase any of your settings! (You might need to resign into Google through the market after.)

(Note: THIS ROM WIPES /SYSTEM, all of it If you have any apps installed into /system (also, if you’ve replaced framework-res.apk) you want to save just in case (apps installed over the market don’t install to /system/app, so you don’t need to worry about them), please back them up before doing so (Also, no need to reroot or anything.)

How to get WiFi Tethering working:

1. Open the Wireless Tethering app from the application list

2. Click Close or Donate, if you wish. It will then say “Binaries and post-installation files installed!”

3. Close the app, it won’t work, so don’t bother trying to enable it yet.

4. Download this tether file, save it to your desktop and rename it to just tether without the .txt part.

5. Rename the file on the phone in /data/data/android.tether/bin/ from tether to tether.orig

6. Push the new tether file you downloaded into /data/data/android.tether/bin/

7. Type the following command into a terminal or a command prompt.

adb shell chmod 700 /data/data/android.tether/bin/tether /data/data/android.tether/bin/tether.orig

That’s it!

Credit also goes to SirPsychoS for his recovery image.

Known Issues:

-Landscape bug in app drawer still exists.

-Weather does not display properly in clock. (It’s in Celsius)

-Picasa syncing only works after wipe/data.

-Gmail syncing may break after installation. (WORKAROUND: Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > Menu button > Filter > All > Select the “Clear Data” option from BOTH “Gmail” and “Gmail Storage”)

(Instructions on how to root/install sprecovery)

Download: http://www.sholes.info/downloads/sp/sholes_info-1.0-RC1.rom.tgz

md5sum: 0edd9bda560de79032e289e288f419c8

sha1sum: 80a07af9eb8d8a60e5a0e61393c792e10d50b725

Also, for anyone who needs it, here’s a clean 2.0.1 image with only root + busybox (use backup/restore with this image):

Download: http://www.sholes.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/virginoem-backup.zip

md5sum: d5e24ab97e643a915a00d3a674e00776

sha1sum: bbed9fb36b754128f6e105a70fb488160e133afb

Side-note: If you’re without adb and you’re trying to update your recovery image, you can download the newest .img, use ASTRO to place it in the root /sdcard directory, then use a terminal emulator like ConnectBot, or something else of the like to run:

$ su

# /data/local/flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-0.99.2b.img

(replace ‘/data/local/’ with wherever your copy of flash_image is installed, or if you don’t have a copy, see the Sholes.info SPRecovery installation guide.

Then reboot into recovery mode and you should be good.

If you wish to donate to the cause, you can send anything (it’s all greatly appreciated) to a.akker214@gmail.com (it will be split amongst the devs afterwards).

*Both Rooting and setting up the backup are potentially hazardous to your  Droid. You are responsible for everything that happens to your phone while following this tutorial, NOT ME. If you have problems while doing this, I may be able to help you if you email me at tyler@tan-com.com or PM me on Freenode IRC network (nick: Flakeparadigm). ONLY continue if you are confident in what you are doing. -Continue at your own risk-*

(EDIT 01/08/2010: I will keep this tutorial updated with the latest version if SPRecovery. Rooting for different versions of Android will be in a separate post.)

After having a bit of a hard time doing this myself, I figured I’d write up a post on how I ended up doing this so that it would be easier for everyone else.

Rooting the Droid

To get root on the Verizon Droid, first download droid-root.zip and copy it to your SD card as update.zip and follow the steps below.

• Reboot your phone.
• Press x on the hardware keyboard while booting until you see the white Motorola logo, then release.
• Press Volume Up + Camera when you see a picture of an exclamation point and a phone.
• Navigate through the menu using the arrows on the hardware keyboard (portrait mode) to Apply sdcard update.
• Apply the update and reboot.
• You now have root.

This is not a traditional Android “rooting”, root access is presently only available through the adb shell. Install the Android Debug Bridge to your PC and enable USB debugging in your phone by going to Settings -> Applications -> Development and selecting USB debugging. In your systems shell (or command prompt for windows) type adb shell (assuming your paths are correct setup) and you will be connected to your Verizon Droid. Type su and you are root. Be very careful with this as you can do damage to your phone when in a root shell.

It should now only be a matter of time before a custom firmware is available for the Motorola Sholes. Do not flash any other firmware updates as this may patch the vulnerability used by droid-root.zip.

From Michael’s “Dereferencing zero” blog.

Backing up your ROM

*This tutorial requires the Android SDK which can be downloaded from here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html*

Download these three files and place them in the tools folder of the SDK:

• http://tan-com.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/flash_image
• http://tan-com.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ramdisk_extras.tar
• http://tan-com.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/recovery-0.99.2b.img

Open up a terminal/command prompt and navigate to the tools folder of the SDK (Example, in Linux “cd ~/android-sdk-linux_86/tools” if you extracted the SDK to your home directory). Now move the downloaded files to the phone using these commands:

./adb push recovery-0.99.2b.img /sdcard/
./adb push ramdisk_extras.tar /sdcard/
./adb push flash_image /sdcard/

Then, move the flash_image binary from the sdcard into /data/local:

./adb shell
su
mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock4 /system
mkdir /system/xbin
dd if=/sdcard/flash_image of=/system/xbin/flash_image
chmod 755 /system/xbin/flash_image
rm /sdcard/flash_image

Now it’s time to flash the image to the recovery partition:

/system/xbin/flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-0.99.2b.img

Now, if you want to keep this recovery image installed, you must follow a few extra steps, as Android normally generates and reflashes the recovery image based on the boot image every time you turn on the phone.  To change this, run:

mount -o remount,rw /dev/null /system
mv /system/recovery-from-boot.p /system/recovery-from-boot.p.bak
mv /system/etc/install-recovery.sh /system/etc/install-recovery.sh.bak

Now, you can reboot your phone into recovery mode.  You have two options: either turn off the phone normally, then hold the ‘x’ button while turning it back on, releasing it only after the Motorola logo appears, or using ADB to reboot the phone (make sure you have exited out of the shell first. Running the “exit” command twice will work):

./adb reboot recovery

If the image was not flashed correctly, you will see an icon that looks like “/!\” (you will have to fix this problem by your own means). However, if the image was flashed correctly, you will see a golden Android logo with a few options in blue near the top of the screen.

To backup, use the D-pad to navigate the selection down to “backup/restore” and press the center button to select it. Then navigate to and select “Simple Nandroid backup” and let Nandroid do the work.

To restore, use the D-pad to navigate the selection down to “backup/restore” and press the center button to select it. Then navigate to and select “Simple Nandroid restore” and let Nandroid do the work.

Once everything is done, use the Power button as a back button to get to the main menu and reboot the device using the menu option. The device will then boot up normally.

The recovery tutorial was created with the help of my friend Scott.

Gateway T-6345U

Ubuntu Karmic is out and many updates have lead to great improvements in compatibility with this laptop. Karmic runs perfectly out of the box except for one thing – screen brightness adjustment doesn’t work. The fix for this is quite simple though.

1. Open up /etc/default/grub in your preferred text editor as root (For a nice GUI interface, press Alt+F2 then enter the command “gksu gedit /etc/default/grub” and press enter.)

2. Once you have the file open, add “nomodeset acpi_backlight=vendor” to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry, save, and exit.

3. Now run (in a terminal – Applications menu > Accessories > Terminal) “sudo grub-update” and reboot your computer. Once started up you should be able to adjust the screen brightness!

Not using Karmic yet? Try the Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) Tutorial for getting this laptop working in Jaunty (9.04).

AZ-Tucson_Flier-0, originally uploaded by tycheent.

The flyer says it all!

What’s new in Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?

I’ve been running the next version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine to test it and report my findings in an easily read list of things to come. Also, some more in depth information for those who want to know. Along with that I’ve been following the updates mailing list and will be using 9.10 in a VM as if it were my main OS.

Screenshots can be found here: http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

After this post, I will be posting updates as they come in weekly. If they are important, however, I will post them the day they come out.

What’s new up in 9.10 as of today: (ordered by personal importance)

• Updated GDM with a new login screen – includes a session type switching menu and battery meter for laptops. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/gdm.png
• Firefox 3.5!
• Empathy is used for Instant Messaging instead of Pidgin. The only downside is Empathy can’t combine contacts as far as I can see. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/empathy.png
• New version of ALSA (1.0.20)
• Kopete has Facebook Chat support.
• Easy, seamless encryption of home directory is optionally available.
• Comes with UbuntuOne Sync tool pre-installed.
• The user switcher has been updated
  • Only contains Account Information, System Settings, Lock Screen, Switch User, and Quit (logout) buttons.
  • System Settings brings up a settings control panel with the contents of the System>Preferences and System>Administration menus.
  • Shutdown buttons were placed back in the System menu.
• The Accessories sub menu has a Swiss Pocket Knife as it’s icon

What needs to be fixed, added, updated:

• Nautilus crashes when you view “Computer” or any network folder.
• New Default theme (the screenshots are of a personally set theme)

Things I haven’t tested, but are in the upcoming release release:

• New Intel drivers (Accepted)
• New NVIDIA drivers

Next Release – Alpha 3 on July 23

A Karmic Koala

Today I’ve decided to take a look at the Daily Release (07/15/09) of Ubuntu and Karmic Koala and post my findings on it to show you what too look forward to in October!

Due to its early stage, this version of Ubuntu does not have a graphical installer, so I won’t post any screenshots for the installation. There is a new feature, however, to seamlessly encrypt your home directory which I will be choosing for the purpose of testing new features. Unfortunately, I got an error saying it could not encrypt my home directory, but on the up side, everything else went fine. Edit: After boot up, it asked me if I would like to try and encrypt it again, and all went fine.

On first boot up, I see several things. For one, the version of the GRUB boot leader has been updated, along with Gnome.

The new version includes a nice looking login screen which is somewhat like that of OS X, and has a couple of changes. 1) The fast user changer no longer has shutdown functions because those have been placed into the System menu as they were before the fast user switcher came out. 2) Ubunutu has sub menus items!!! WOAH! There’s a Logic Games sub menu in the Applications menu under games. 3) Empathy is used as the default IM client.

There are also a couple of things that haven’t changed that might should be such as Firefox hasn’t been updated to 3.5 and also the Wallpaper is still the Jaunty defauly, but that probably won’t change till late betas or even RC.

All of my screenshots so far, and ones soon to come are/will be in http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

I will be posting updated articles about the new features of Karmic Koala

Gateway T-6345U

I recently got a new Gateway T-6345U laptop and (being a Linux lover) I installed Ubuntu Jaunty on it right after I made sure it all worked.

Installation

Installing Ubuntu was as easy as usual, though it went a little slow due to Gnome’s power manager’s lack of using the maximum CPU speed. Fortunately, there’s a panel applet that is installed by default to help with this. It’s called “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor”. Due to the face that the Laptop has two CPUs, you will need two instances of this applet each set to monitor a different CPU.

First Run

When you reboot after installing it, everything works perfectly… well, almost everything. Three (sometimes vital) things don’t work right out of the box. These three are the desktop effects, adjusting the screen brightness, and the headphones and microphone jacks on the front. Don’t panic if your headphones or microphone doesn’t work, it’s a software issue which I have also found a fix for. Oh, ad you will probably want to add the CPU scaling applet to your panel.

EDIT 06/06/09: I have also found that when a memory card is put into the reader, it is recognized only as generic storage media. I will post a fix for this when/if I find one.

EDIT 07/14/09: I have added the steps to get the headphone and microphone jacks on the front to work properly.
Read More

I’ve recorded a tutorial on how to set up a Wii Remote as a mouse in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and also written a text version below the video if you would prefer to use that. There is also a text version of this tutorial for those who like to copy and paste below this.

Read More

Inserting Charts/Graphs

I have recently been asked how to insert a graph in Apple’s iWork Pages program, so here is a short post about inserting a chart or graph in Pages.

Inserting Graphs

To insert a chart, just simply click on the “Charts” button on the tool bar then you can select what type of chart you would like.

You can also go to the “Insert” menu then go to “Charts”. This will give you a list of different charts you can insert.

Editing Graph Data

Once you add a graph, the “Chart Data Editor” should comes up. This will allow you to edit the data that the graph displays.

The "Chart Data Editor"

Formatting the Graph

Along with the Data Editor, the “Inspector” also comes up which gives you options for formatting how your graph looks.

The "Inspector"

ATI

(Edit: this tutorial does not work with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and I will unfortunately not be able to update it for Karmic because I do not have the time nor hardware.)

(Edit 01/05/10: I am currently testing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and in the process I will see if it is possible to accomplish the chore of getting  these older cards working.)

With the newest realease of Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) came a major problem with support for older ATI graphics cards. Though these cards work with generic drivers, the ability to use dual heads and more advanced configurations has been lost. You may think that you can simply head over to AMD’s ATI driver page and get a driver, but the latest version of Catalyst does not support the older cards. “Maybe I can just download an older version of the driver,” might be what you are thinking, but the old driver is not compatible with the new version of xserver that is included with Ubuntu Jaunty.

The only way to use the old driver is to downgrade your xserver, which is actually not too hard. As long as you have an internet connection and some terminal skills, you are set.

Read More