Anyways, I finally got off my behind and installed Cyanogenmod 7.2, ie. Android 2.3.7 on my Samsung I5500 which was previously a 2.2 Froyo phone.
CM basic apps, with extra "Egg Timer" and Opera installed. |
I really got bored of the slowness of the original Samsung firmware - sometimes it took 5-10 seconds before I could place a call. And the phone's memory was really starting to limit me even with everything possible installed on the 8BG SD card.
Why it took so long was mostly because previous versions of CM had some "features" (read bugs or incompabilities) and all the instructions on the net really use the Rom Manager, an Android app that costs 4,95 eur (the free version isn't up to snuff when it comes to installing stuff on the Galaxy5).
So, how to do it? Let's see...
All the files I used
Oh, and absolutely no support and all questions will go unanswered (this is mostly for my own memoirs :P ).
Preparation:
- Export your contact data to your SD card (phone / contacts then hit menu button and choose import/export). Make sure you save all your contacts in the VCF file.
- If you want to save your SMS messages, install "SMS Backup & Restore" from the Android Market, it's free. Use it.
- Make sure there's nothing on the phone you cannot afford to lose, apart from the gallery, pretty much everything will be lost.
Rooting your Galaxy:
- Connect your Galaxy5 to your PC via USB and let it install the drivers, make sure it's in the "USB debugging mode" (in Finnish it's a "little" misleading "USB-vianetsintä" under the "Sovellusasetukset / Kehittäminen" menu)
- Unpack "SuperOneClickv2.3.3-ShortFuse.zip" to your PC and run it.
- When it sees your phone, hit the "Root"-button to root your phone and if it asks to install busybox, let it do it, it's really that simple.
- Now you have a rooted phone and a new app "superuser" installed in the apps screen.
Moving the neccessary files into your phone:
- Mount your phone on your PC as mass media with your USB cable and copy the "update-cm-7-20120206-MADTEAM-galaxy5.zip" (or newer if you have it) and "gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip" (Google apps, 28.11.2011 version) to the SD card, you can use a sub directory if you want.
Installing the recovery partition / mod installer - ClockworkMod:
- First, copy ODIN (the firmware flasher, from the "odin v4.28 and ops file" directory) on your PC and make sure your phone is in "USB debug mode"(from the settings menu).
- Put your phone into "recovery mode" by shutting it down and booting with "VOLUME DOWN" + "SELECT BUTTON" + "POWER OFF / HANG CALL BUTTON" pressed down simultaneously (select is the middle button surrounded by the silver cursor "ring")
- Connect the phone and let windows install the drivers for it.
- Run ODIN in administrator mode ("run as") and make sure ODIN can see the phone and then select option "One package" (options "auto reboot" and "protect OPS" should be selected by default).
- As the "OPS" file, select the "EUROPA_I5508_v1.0.ops" that came with ODIN (it's in the same directory)
- As the "One Package" file select "ClockworkMod-Galaxy5-v0.7.tar"
- Hit "Start" and wait until it has installed ClockworkMod
- Optional "to-do" in ClockworkMod: if you want to install another version, you can copy it on the SD card and install it via the "zip" option on the main menu (you can also mount the SD card for your PC on the main menu)
Installing the CyanogenMod:
- If you want to install CM later, and rather boot now back to your old system, you need a way to reboot in to ClockworkMod later on. There are several ways to do this later, like installing a "rom manager" -type software (the actual Rom Manager, free version, from the app store didn't work well with Galaxy5, so I used ROM Toolbox instead) or you can always re-flash with ODIN and let it boot into ClockworkMod.
- Anyway, when you are in ClockworkMod and before you start flashing (for the first time), wipe the caches, etc by selecting:
"wipe data/factory reset" and "wipe cache partition" and then advanced/wipe both "dalvik cache" and "battery stats" - After that choose "install zip from sd card" and navigate to where you saved "update-cm-7-20120206-MADTEAM-galaxy5.zip" and let it flash.
- Then do the same with "gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip"
- If everything went OK, reboot and you now have CyanogenMod installed (the first boot will take considerably longer than the normal boots after that).
CyanogenMod performance menu in the settings (in Finnish) |
- Samsung doesn't really support their phones for long. The latest Android version is 2.2 and it seems to be the last. CM for Android 4.0 is already under development, and hopefully will be released as fully working "final" later on this year
- CM is faster, you can over clock your cheap 600MHz phone easily for 10-20% speed gains (and battery loss :D ), you can also get rid of excess baggage like the Samsung apps and even some Google apps that have been installed into the phone memory and are hogging the precious little RAM we have in the Galaxy5 - with CM you can install Google Maps on the SD card, etc.
- CM works pretty well now; WLAN & WLAN APs work OK, telephony and GPS work, etc. You're no longer trading usability and features for a OS update.
- You don't need to be a Yarrr!-Pirate to get mileage from a rooted phone.
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