AndroidCyanogenmod - rudiswiki9

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Android Cyanogenmod

Android Cyanogenmod

CyanogenMod is a customized, after market firmware distribution for several Android devices. Based on the Android Open Source Project, CyanogenMod (CM) is designed to increase performance and reliability over Android-based ROMs released by vendors and carriers such as Google, T-Mobile, HTC, etc. CyanogenMod also offers a variety of features & enhancements that are not currently found in these versions of Android. See also http://www.cyanogenmod.org.

I like to describe the implementation on a Samsung Galaxy S I9000 smartphone by mostly providing links to the necessary guides and sources.

Samsung Galaxy S I9000

Unfortunately Samsung updated the very popular Galaxy S I9000 smartphone to the Android version 2.3.6 (Gingerbread) only.

The very clever Cyanogenmod people developed that further up to Android version 4.2. The Cyanogenmod version 10.0 is comparable to Android 4.1.2 (jelly bean) and is stable in operation. I tried that with my Galaxy S I9000.

$/!\$ A version table, matching Cyanogenmod versions to Android versions can be found at wikipedia.

2015-06-25 Update: On the Release channel there is now version cm-11 (2014-11-12), which means Android version 4.4 Kitkat.

MAC OS X use

In order to flash the Galaxy S I9000 you need a programming tool. Popular is the program Odin, but it works under Win32 only. The open source equivalent Heimdall has a version for Linux, MAC OS X and Win32.

For MD5 checking use the free app ff_md5drop.

Root & Custom Recovery

The original recovery is not very flexible. You can start it with:

Shut down the smartphone
Press keys together: Volume up & Home & Power On.
A menu will appear where you can navigate with the keys Volume down and Volume up, press Home for Enter.

In order to root the smartphone and to have a more flexible custom recovery on board, use the very popular Clockworkmod.

Guide in general

Next step is to backup your old firmware, usually Gingerbreead (2.3.6) to the internal sdcard. Then you have the chance to go back to the original firmware in case of a problem with the new firmware (Cyanogenmod).

Shut down the smartphone
Press keys together: Volume up & Home & Power On.
A menu will appear where you can navigate with the keys Volume down and Volume up, press Home for Enter.
Use the menu item backup and restore. It allows you to take a snapshot of your phone’s entire internal memory including all partitions, and save it on the SD card, path /sdcard/clockworkmod/backup/. The folder name for your backup is the date and time you did the backup, e.g. 2013-08-14.09.12.20/. In case of making several backups it is wise to note which date is which version of the firmware.

Flashing Cyanogenmod

The basic information for the Samsung Galaxy S I9000 (Galaxymtd) can be found here

The easiest method to flash the firmware is via clockworkmod, see Install_CM_for_galaxysmtd with the provided .zip files.

CM 10.1.2 (Android 4.2) cm-10.1.2-galaxysmtd.zip, 163 MB, MD5sum: 04e0333d6cf6850e4f16a7e52a241174
Google Apps for 4.2: gapps-jb-20130301-signed.zip, 96 MB, MD5sum: b7e53e96e1c8b1a1c4865bf29418c8e0
Create a folder on the I9000 with name e.g. 1flash.
Copy the .zip files to that folder.
Start with the keys Volume up & Home & Power On in clockworkmod.
Select the option to wipe data/factory reset.
Install cm-10.1.2-galaxysmtd.zip from internal sdcard (1flash/).
Select menu item reboot and wait for the main screen (about 1-2 minutes).
Select in settings the WLAN router and your language.
Shut down the phone.
Start with the keys Volume up & Home & Power On in clockworkmod.
Install gapps-jb-20130301-signed.zip from internal sdcard.
Select menu item reboot and wait for the main screen (about 1-2 minutes).
Log into your android email account, then you could use Play Store.

Specialties

USB Connection - When flashing the smartphone it is the best to connect the USB plug directly to the main board of your PC, or to a powered hub. If not, a transfer error can arise, as I have already seen.
Download on Samsung Galaxy S I9000 - Press keys together: Volume down & Home & Power On. This will show after a few seconds a screen with a yellow marking Download.
Recovery on Samsung Galaxy S I9000 - Press keys together: Volume up & Home & Power On. This will show the recovery menu, usually ClockworkMod.

FAQs

Question: I flashed a few kernels and looking to go back to stock where can I find it?
- Answer: You mean the kernel that comes with CM? If so, I don't know where to find the kernel only in a .zip file, but you could always backup your apps using Titanium Backup, export your launcher config, then re-install CM and restore your apps and launcher.

USB OTG

USB-OTG (On The Go) is the Host mode for the smartphone USB port. Usually the chip set does provide this capability, but it needs a special USB driver in the kernel. Unfortunately the Cyanogenmod 10 does not have the OTG driver included in the kernel. So I tried to change to a kernel from semaphore 2.6.5 with claims to have such an OTG driver included and is compatible with Cyanogenmod 10.

The procedure is to download the file Semaphore_JB_2.6.5.tar and untar it to zImage. Then run with the Heimdall package:

$ sudo heimdall flash --kernel  zImage
…
Downloading device's PIT file...
PIT file download successful.

ERROR: Partition "kernel" does not exist in the specified PIT.
…
- That does not work!

Another try was with the USB-OTG-Helper from the app store. That does not work either.