Information & Technology: February 2013

Increase Your Internal Memory from Link2sd

Link2SD is an android application by Bulent Akpinar that lets you move apps and games to the 2nd partition of your SD card. Why do we have to use Link2SD when Froyo and Gingerbread’s Native Apps2sd moves the files to the SD card? Native apps2sd only moves the apk file of the application leaving other files in internal memory thus you still have to manage your on-board memory and limit your choice of apps because it will eat up your memory and later on you cannot install any files anymore. Additionally, widgets and some applications are not intended to be moved to the SD card. However, Link2SD is only for root users because it is required that your phone is rooted.

The idea behind the application is the same. But Link2SD has more relevant features which the Native Apps2sd lacked giving Android 1.5 and up users the chance to have a taste of what it’s like to have a big phone memory. Additional features were added by the developer to furher optimize the usage of android devices. By using Link2SD, you can move not only the application file, but also the dalvic-cache and libray files of the application. This means that data will be the only one left to consume your internal memory thus installing applications and games would be easier because you can install anything you want without worrying about the famous low memory problem. Furthermore, Link2sd covers all files even moving widgets and the unmoveable applications to the 2nd partition of your SD card.

This is a step by step guide on how you can run Link2SD on your device. This tutorial will work for both stock and cutom ROMs. For ClockWorkMod Recovery users, you can check the other guide below. Follow all the instructions carefully to eliminate possible problems.

First you have to download Mini Tool Partition Wizard Manager. You can download it HERE.
Insert your SD card to a card reader and open it on your computer.
Back up all your files to the computer because partitioning will wipe your data.
Open Mini Tool in your computer. Locate your SD card (be careful in choosing and make sure not to choose the drive of your computer)
Right click and choose Delete.
Right click on it again and choose Create New. Create “FAT32″ partition (This is where all your media files will go. Be sure to make it bigger than the 2nd part)
Select “Create as: PRIMARY”
Next, create an ext2/ext3/ext4 partition (if you’re on stock ROM, choose ext2). This is where your apps will go. I suggest a value of 512Mb or 1Gb would be big enough but if you insist you can go as high as 2Gb.
Select “Create As: PRIMARY” (make sure that it is both set to primary because it will not work if it is not set to primary)
Click the “Apply” button on the top left corner and wait for it to finish the process. Done.
Put back your SD card to your phone and switch it on.
Download and install Link2sd from Google Play Store.
Open Link2sd. You will be prompted to choose between ext2, ext3, ext4 and FAT32. Select ext2.
It will say mount script created. Reboot your phone now.
Open link2sd and if the message doesn’t show up, you succeded.
Go to Link2sd>Settings>check the autolink (to automatically move apps upon installation)
If you already have some apps, ~~select “move to phone” then after moving~~ select “Create Link” (be sure to check the three files: app, dalvic-cache and library files)
To check your memory, select “Storage Info”. This will show you the current state of your internal memory, FAT32, and ext2 partition.
Now you’re done and ready to install vast amount of applications as you wish!

FOR CLOCKWORKMOD RECOVERY USERS ONLY( ALTERNATIVE METHOD)

NOTE: You can also use the instructions above. This guide will work on both stock and custom ROMs.

Back up all your files to your computer. Partitioning wipes the files of your SD card.
Go into recovery mode
Select “Advanced”
Select “Partition SD card”
Choose your SD-ext size (if you’re using a 2Gb SD card, choose 512Mb. If your SD card is 4Gb or greater, you can choose 1024Mb)
Select 0 swap
Wait for the process to finish. Reboot.
Download and install Link2SD from Google Play Store.
Open Link2SD you will be prompted to choose between ext2, ext3, ext4 or FAT32. Choose ext4.
Follow instructions number 14-20. DONE!

Having troubles? Feel free to comment and post your questions below. Enjoy!

Increase your Internal Memory :Android

Took 30 seconds and freed up 260mb! This is what you do:

1. Using root explorer or similar. Go to /Data.

2. Navigate to "Dalvik-Cache" directory. Long press on it and select "move".

3. Navigate back to root directory and then to /System.

4. Paste the directory you must select rw first top right hand corner. It will take a minute to copy.

5. Now long press on the moved Dalvik-Cache directory in /System and select "Link to this folder" option.

6. Navigate back to /Data and paste the link.

7. Done! You now have moved the Dalvik-Cache location to unused space on System partition and left a sym-linked directory so Android thinks nothing has changed!

91 Launcher: Android Home Screen App With Great Themes & Transitions

Launchers are custom home screen replacement apps that rank among the most distinguishing features of Android, and they’re available in abundance from third parties. No matter how many high-quality and versatile Android launchers you might have already tried, there is always another one right around the corner. New to the market, 91 Launcher is yet another insanely feature-rich Android home screen replacement that seems to have been inspired from the Chinese-based MIUI custom ROM. Available in the Play Store for free, this promising app has almost everything you could ask from a quality launcher, including gesture-based controls for accessing system features anywhere in the OS, multiple fully configurable home screens and dock items, an impressive array of themes, wallpapers & transition effects, dedicated widgets, shortcuts & folders, native app drawer with folder support, option to import icons from other installed launchers, iPhone & Android 4.0 ICS-style folders with option to encrypt their content, predefined power-saving system profiles, system-wide search support, and needless to say, tons of customizations.

Continuing with other salient features of 91 Launcher, you get resizable widgets, option to automatically create new folders by dragging app shortcuts over each other on both home screen and app drawer, iOS-style uninstallation of apps by holding down on their respective shortcuts momentarily, easy manipulation of home screens with the option to specify the default screen, and a fully configurable power toggles widget.

By default, 91 Launcher lets you use the glide-down gesture to reveal the system toggles & shortcuts menu, whereas the glide-up gesture can be used to reveal the launcher’s own menu. However, like most aspects of the launcher, these gestures can be personalized to launch various supported actions such as a specific app, home screen, and system shortcut etc. The readily available and downloadable themes and wallpapers are attractive in their own respect, but the most noticeable facet of the entire launcher remains its various transition effects that can be enjoyed while switching back and forth between home screens. Ranging from pendulum to chariot-style animations, there are dozens of effects to choose from.

91 Launcher’s own widgets include an analog clock widget, a couple of weather widgets, a 1-tap system optimization widget, a power saving modes widget, and a system shortcuts widget. The power saving widget – as indicated by its name – offers you various preset battery saving modes to conserve your device’s power. If you’re not too satisfied with the readily available options, you can define your own power mode with brightness level, screen timeout delay, volume levels and various power toggles of choice. That’s not all – there are also a couple of predefined folders that you can place on your device’s home screen to access the recently opened and/or installed apps.

Certain features like the weather widget, the native 91 Lockscreen and a bunch of other goodies require you to install additional apps/plugins. However, like the launcher itself, all its supplementary tools are available in the Play Store for free.

Download 91 Launcher For Android

What Is ADB And How To Install It With Android SDK

When it comes to Android modding, most novice users are confused or left wondering by reference over reference to a certain “adb”. This is specially true when you are looking up something on modding your device, or root it in particular. ADB is the wonder toy of Android and everyone seems to love it, so lets have a look at understanding what it is and why you need it, and how you can get it.

What Is ADB

ADB stands for Android Debug Bridge. It comes as a part of the standard Android SDK, which you can grab here. Basically, it provides a terminal-based interface for interacting with your phone’s file system. Since Android platform is based on Linux, command-line is the only way to obtain and manipulate root access often required to perform certain advanced operations on your device using root access.

While these things can be done directly on the device itself using some terminal emulator, it will be rather difficult to execute complex commands on such a small screen. ADB provides the bridge between your machine and your computer.

How To Install ADB

Step 1: Installing the Android SDK

Note: At the time of updating this guide, the latest version of the Android SDK available is r8 and we shall be using it throughout the rest of the guide. The tools will work the same way however, even if you get a later version. In case of earlier versions though, the location of some of the tools was different and it is recommended that you get the latest available version.

The first step is to download the SDK. Use the link given at the end of this post and download the latest version of the Android SDK from there. There are versions available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. In case of Windows, both an installer and a zip file are available but there isn’t any need to use the installer as a formal installation is not required.

Once you have downloaded the SDK, simply extract the compressed file to a location on your computer. In our case, we have extracted it to the root of our C drive and that makes C:\android-sdk-windows the installation location of the SDK. From here onwards, we shall be referring to this location as the ‘SDK folder’.

Step 2: Downloading the SDK Platform Tools

Previously, ADB used to be included in the SDK by default in the ‘tools’ sub-folder but now, it has been relocated to the ‘platform-tools’ sub-folder which needs to be downloaded as an SDK package. Fortunately, this is quite easy:

Just browse to the SDK folder and launch SDK Manager. When launching it for the first time, it will present you with a window to choose packages to install. The first option begins with ‘Android SDK Platform-tools’. Make sure it is checked, and uncheck all the other packages for now. You can check/uncheck a package by clicking on its name and then selecting the Accept/Reject radio button. Your window should look like this:

Now simply click ‘Install’ and wait till the platform tools are installed. Once the process is done, you will have a ‘platform-tools’ folder inside your SDK folder. That folder will include ADB and all its dependencies.

Step 3: Setting the Path variable

Now you have ADB installed but using it this way will require you to either use the complete path of the ADB command (C:\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools\adb) or to first change directory to the platform-tools subfolder of the SDK folder each time, and this can become quite a hassle. To make ADB along with other Android SDK tools and platform tools easily accessible from anywhere at the command line, we shall add their paths to the PATH environment variable. This method will apply to Windows users only. If you are a Linux or Mac user, add the ‘tools’ and ‘platform-tools’ sub-folders of the Android SDK to your system’s PATH variable using the standard method for your operating system.

If you have no experience with editing system environment variables, make a System Restore point now so that you can revert back to it in case something goes wrong.
If you are using Windows 7, right-click the ‘Computer’ icon and click ‘Properties’. Now click ‘Advanced System Settings’ from the options in the left pane to bring up the ‘System Properties’ window. Windows XP users will directly get this window when they right-click ‘My Computer’ and click ‘Properties’.
In the ‘System Properties’ window, click the ‘Environment Variables’ button on the ‘Advanced’ tab.
Find ‘Path’ in the ‘System variables’ section and double-click it to edit it.
Make sure NOT to delete the existing entry in ‘Variable value’ or it will mess up things on your computer. Just add the following string to the end of it, including both the semi-colons:
```
;c:\android-sdk-windows\tools;c:\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools
```
If you have extracted the SDK’s contents to another directory, make sure to use that one for your PATH variable.

After adding the string, this is what my Path variable looks like:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Shared;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_23\bin;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_23\bin;C:\android-sdk-windows\tools;C:\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools

Don’t worry if yours does not include some of the other text – what is important is the way the new entry should be added to the existign one, and the way the previous entries MUST be left unchanged. Notice that the semi-colons are necessary to separate each path variable entry from the next and previous ones. Once you have added the path, your machine may require a reboot.

In case you messed up while editing the Path variable and ended up deleting the previously existing entries, just restore the System Restore point you made and retry, being more careful this time.

Step 4: Installing the USB drivers

Finally, you need to install the USB drivers. You may or may not need to perform this step, depending on your device. If you are using a device that ships with stock Android operating system such as the Nexus One, this will be necessary. In case of other devices that ship with their custom version of Android and some tools to sync the device with the PC, such as devices from HTC that ship with HTC Sync or devices by Samsung that ship with Samsung’s own software, the suitable driver for your device will be automatically installed with that software package.

The first step will be to download the USB drivers. To do this, launch SDK Manager from the SDK folder and click on ‘Available packages’ in the left pane.
Expand ‘Third party Add-ons’ followed by ‘Google Inc. add-ons’ and check ‘Google Usb Driver package’, as shown in this image:

Click ‘Install Selected’ and in the window that pops up, click the ‘Accept all’ radio button followed by the ‘Install’ button. Wait patiently while the USB drivers are downloaded and installed in the Android SDK.
The drivers for both 32 bit and 64 bit systems will now be present in the SDK folder under ‘usb_driver\x86′ and ‘usb_driver\x64′ sub-folders respectively.

Now that the USB drivers have been downloaded, you can install them to your computer as follows:

On the device, go to home screen, press Menu, select Applications > Development, and enableUSB Debugging.
Now connect your phone to the PC via USB. New hardware installation should kick in, and it will start looking for the drivers.
Manually point the drivers to the folder suitable for your operating system and let them install.
Once drivers have installed, you can verify successful installation by going to Device Manager. Your phone should be showing under ‘ADB Interface’, like in this example:

How To Use ADB

At this point, the setting is done. Here on you can simply use adb to manipulate your phone in whatever way you like. On Windows, the best way to do so is using command prompt. To ensure that adb has been set up properly, run command prompt and type ‘adb devices’ and hit enter. Your connected device should show up with a serial number.

This is it for this guide. We would like to emphasize that playing with your phone at this level can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing, and can even render the phone completely useless. Please do it at your own risk.

For a complete list of adb commands, check out the official adb guide here.

Download Android SDK

How To Backup Your Android Phone’s Boot, Recovery And System Partition Images

One can’t stress enough on the importance of backups and when it comes to tinkering with your Android phone, a backup of your system, recovery and boot partitions can save you a lot of hassle that you might otherwise have to go through if you mess things up and need those stock images. In this guide, we will tell you how to take these backups using a free tool called RomDump.

Although you can find these backups on the internet, those have been taken by other users and you never know if they have been modified to contain malicious code or not. Secondly, you can’t be too sure if they would work with the exact specifications of your phone or not, as even for the same phone model, there can be differences depending on the phone’s regions, intended carriers and other similar factors, and flashing a wrong boot, system or recovery image to your phone can most likely brick it. Therefore, it is always a great idea to take backup images of these partitions of your device yourself before you attempt to modify them, so that they can be recovered later if anything goes wrong.

RomDump is a free tool that lets you do just that. It is quite easy to use for anyone who is comfortable with typing a few commands, and effectively creates backup images of your Android phone’s boot, recovery and system partitions. It requires your phone to be rooted first and you will either need ADB installed on your computer or a terminal application installed on your Android device.

Now that we have had an overview, let’s proceed to actually getting things done.

Before you proceed:

Make sure that your device is rooted. If it isn’t, do a quick search on our site for “root phone_name” without the quotes, replacing ‘phone_name’ with the name of your device. You will find an easy to follow guide on rooting your phone.
In case you are using the ADB method, make sure you have ADB installed on your computer. If it isn’t, refer to our guide on what is ADB and how to set it up on your computer.
On the other hand, if you are going to use a terminal application, download and install Android Terminal Emulator which is available for free in the Android Market.

Now proceed according to the method that you chose.

ADB Method:

Download RomDump from the link given below, extract the file named ‘install’ from the downloaded zip archive to your computer and copy it to the ‘tools’ folder of your Android SDK installation folder.
Connect your phone to your computer via USB and make sure USB debugging mode is enabled in Settings >> Applications >> Development.

Open a command prompt window and enter the following commands:

adb push install /data/local/
adb shell chmod 04755 /data/local/install
adb shell /data/local/install

You might see some output of the above command. Wait until it finishes.
Enable and then disable Wi-Fi on your Android phone. If it was already enabled, disable, enable and then disable it again.
Type this command in the command prompt window on your computer:
```
adb shell romdump
```
Wait patiently for the process to finish and you’re done. You may now exit the command prompt.

Terminal Method:

Download RomDump from the link given below, extract the file named ‘install’ from the downloaded zip archive to your computer and copy it to the root of your phone’s storage card.
Launch Android Terminal Emulator (or any other terminal app of your choice) on your Android phone and enter these commands:
```
su

cat /sdcard/install >/data/local/install
chmod 04755 /data/local/install
/data/local/install
```
You will see some output of the above command. Wait till the output finishes.
After this last line has appeared, enable and then disable Wi-Fi on your phone. If it was already enabled, disable, enable and then disable it again.
Type this command in Terminal Emulator:
```
/system/bin/romdump
```
Wait patiently till the process finishes and you’re done. You may now exit Terminal Emulator.

If you have completed the above steps for any of the two methods successfully, you will find a folder named ‘romdump’ on the root of your SD card that contains a subfolder by the name of your device model. This folder will contain the boot, system and recovery partition images.

Alternative Method If The Above Does Not Work:

If this method does not work for you and all you need to backup is your recovery and boot images, you can simply do so as follows.

Note: Do NOT attempt to backup the system partition using this method as the system image it produces this way will NOT be a valid system image to be used later to restore your system partition. Use it only for the recovery and boot partition images.

If you are using ADB, connect your device to your computer via USB, launch a command prompt window on your computer and enter the following command:
```
adb shell
```
If you are using Terminal Emulator instead, just launch it on your Android phone and enter the following command and agree to grant any permissions you’re prompted for:
```
su
```
The remaining process will be the same for both ADB and Terminal Emulator.
Enter the following command:
```
cat proc/mtd
```

You will get an output similar to this. Note that your result may differ from this one and you must proceed according to the output that you get, rather than the example that you see here.

dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 000a0000 00020000 "misc"
mtd1: 00480000 00020000 "recovery"
mtd2: 00300000 00020000 "boot"
mtd3: 0fa00000 00020000 "system"
mtd4: 02800000 00020000 "cache"
mtd5: 093a0000 00020000 "userdata"

To dump the recovery image to your SD card, make note of the first word of the line which says “recovery” in the end. It is ‘mtd1’ in case of this example but may be another entry for you. Now use this command, replacing ‘mtd1’ with the term that applies in your case, if different:
```
dd if=/dev/mtd/mtd1 of=/sdcard/recovery.img bs=4096
```
Similarly, to dump the boot image to your SD card, make note of the first word of the line which says “boot” in the end, which is ‘mtd2’ in our case but may differ for you. Use this command now, replacing ‘mtd2’ with the term that is applicable in your case, if different:
```
dd if=/dev/mtd/mtd2 of=/sdcard/boot.img bs=4096
```

That’s it – you now have recovery.img and boot.img backed up on the root of your SD card.

Download RomDump v72

Information & Technology

Pages