A little over a month and half or so ago I wrote about switching from the JesusFreke Android Mods to the CyanogenMod (previous post). Shortly after that the Android community had its first scuffle with Google. When I initially switched to the CyanogenMod, I opted to stay with the 'stable' build, but as soon as I heard that Cyanogen was going to include Donut(1.6) in his experimental builds I had to switch to see what it was like. Unfortunately while all of us out there loved the fact that cyanogen was including 1.6, Google didn't like the fact that he was bundling 'closed-source' applications, and thus the scuffle began, and the community was in an uproar about Google not being as open as they claimed...
I made a few comments on Reddit and various blogs and news stories, but I never took the time to comment on my blog... well basically because I for the most part agreed with Google, there were other things that bothered me. As a developer I fully agree with the nature that some projects are and should be closed source applications while others should be open source. Android is an open source Operating System, not an open source bundle of applications... anyways so besides the slow-down to cyanogens mods, what bothered me with the whole situation was that the apps in question have all been available to other phones and devices for free for years, why couldn't Google just say "sorry modders, you can't include our closed sources apps with your builds, but we'll put the on Market or another location so your users can install them manually like they can on other smartphones and devices". Well from what I know they didn't, but thankfully Cyanogen stood up for what he wanted to do and work out a solution with Google where us users simply have to preserve the apps that are already on our devices and then install his updates and therefore he no longer has to include closed-source apps in his builds.
So with the solution at hand, cyanogen began work on the workaround and sure enough a short time later he had it up and working... only downside was that for the initial upgrade there were some significant additional steps. Between the following links, I'm sure you can figure them out... I did... well after a few tries... first the links then my issues with the process:
http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/10/04/how-to-install-cyanogenmod-4-1-99-on-your-g1-android-phone/
http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/10/06/how-to-update-cyanogenmod-from-4-1-99-to-4-1-999/
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/rom/cyanogenmod-4-1-999
So last week i upgraded... so some notes on my trials... well my first assumption was that I could skip the 4.1.99 build, and I probably could of... but my first attempt didn't work, so I tried again this time starting with the 4.1.99 build and as it turned out I didn't need to d the 4.1.99 build, but really we are only talking a few extra minutes (well maybe 15-20). So anyways my first mistake was that I decided to skip the initial 'WIPE' step... I figured whats the worse that can happen... well your phone will never finish the reboot that is what happened... well so I rebooted into the recovery system and restored from my nandroid backup (oh yes like I stated last time... NANDROID is your best friend when it comes to working with modded images).
So my next try... I WIPED my phone but this time I messed up again... I rebooted between the install of the HTC image and he cyanogen 4.1.99 image... I've read that it shouldn't make any difference, but in my case I was sure that was my next problem. But again it was not....
So again I restored from Nandroid... and this time I followed every step to the letter.. or so I thought... still had an issue... so I decided to connect my phone to my computer and lauch 'adb logcat' and sure enough, I finally saw my issue... while I thought I was wiping my phone... it turns out I was not. Turns out that the wipe feature on the cyanogen recovery images only blanks the built-in memory portion, not the portion moved to the sdcard's ext partition. So off to Google to research how to blank the ext partition...well I found many helpful sites even a youtube video.. and well none of them worked for me... my solution just like last time... LINUX to the rescue. I popped out my card, stuck it in an SD adapter and into my computer, launched Gparted and reformatted the partition... I even upgraded it to ext3 from ext2 (probably could of selected ext4, but I didn't, if anyone has any suggestion or reason why I should, please share). I popped the card back into my G1 and ran through the update process again and yep everything worked...
So the moral of the story... WIPE WIPE WIPE before switching from Cyanogen 4.1.11 to 4.1.999
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