Slamland 2

Last June I wrote about my new phone, an LG Optimus 2x. For a few months I was quite pleased with it and then the performance started to slowly fall off. This is the very first dual-core phone to hit the market. However, it did not deserve its software. It was Android 2.2.2, Froyo, which LG had promised to upgrade to v2.3.n Gingerbread ASAP.

For various reasons, and I am not surprised, the upgrade never happened nor do I expect it to happen anytime this year. To make a long story shorter, I rooted the phone to try and get a handle on what was slowing it down. Android is, after all, a special version of Linux. Much research and customization later and the single thing that stands out is to upgrade to the Gingerbread version, leaving Froyo back in the weeds. I grabbed the most popular and prevalent ROM distro out there, Cyanogen Mod7 (Official website).

I won’t get the nightly builds because I have to rely on this beast and I don’t intend to upgrade it that often. What I learned a long time ago, with Linux, is that the furthest out you dare go is the current Release Candidate for the next stable version. Any further and you are dancing too much on the Bleeding Edge. It’s not a question of if it will cut you but when. Ergo, I got the current RC1 version.

Lot’s of techy stuff later, including getting my phone stuck in a boot-loop, aka bricking it¹ , for three hours and the new ROM²  plays.

I can now dial out immediately, instead of waiting five minutes for the background processor to decide to let me have enough CPU to dial out³ . Now the damned thing does everything but dance jigs   The only unfinished bit is the sync software betwixt my laptop and the phone. SyncCell has already been acquired and I can then properly torpedo the POS⁴ that is LG’s PC Suite IV⁵ .

So, there goes my first foray back into Tinkerland (Linux-ware and the Open Source Community). My next Foray will be an expedition into Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that the current WordPress now requires version 5.2+ of PHP and the highest version I can run under Win2K is 5.1.4. This means that we either have to fork over some serious dinero to M$ for many copies of their current server offering or I set up my web server with Ubuntu Linux and remember how to play with the fools at the Apache foundation again (sigh).

For the moment, my break is over, and it’s back to finishing the current book.

1. Technical term for turning your multi hundred dollar phone into something only suitable for defenestration. The NV flasher  was instrumental in breaking it out of the loop. It turns out that I hadn’t wiped the working RAM properly. I also had to install the ClockworkMod boot loader into Non-Volatile NAND RAM (hence, the ‘NV’ and the bootloading tool is called Nandroid) [↩]
2. This is a pet peeve of mine. As a EE I used to play with real Read Only Memory(ROM) chips, including EPROMs. The Android binaries actually get loaded into flash RAM, or NAND RAM, which didn’t exist in the late 70’s. What Android folks call a ROM is actually a executable binary software image file. There are no more actual ROMs these days; it’s all RAM. [↩]
3. This is the very first ever dual-core phone, remember? [↩]
4. Piece Of Shit [↩]
5. One major argument against client-side software written in Java. Client-side code needs to be native compiled to perform well (at all?). [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.