Android Recovery

Hello friends...After a long time again getting a chance to talk on technology. My today’s blog is for mainly two types of people. Firstly those who are newbie like me to this technology about which i will discuss today and secondly for those who like to play with their cell-phones and upgrading their cell-phones.

Recovery is the feature provided to every android phone. Recovery is the concept which deals with the restoring the data back when phone failure occurs. Recovery is the feature which is provided in every Android phone. All Android devices ship with a recovery environment preinstalled. This recovery software can be used to restore the device to factory default settings, update its operating system, and perform other diagnostic tasks.

Fig1: Recovery mode

Before this let us first put a light on the two mostly used recoveries. Mainly there are two types of recoveries. The ROM which comes along with the phone i.e. they are in built such types of recovery is called as “Stock recovery”. Android devices come with Google’s recovery environment, which is often referred to as the “stock recovery.” Stock recovery is also called as 3e. Stock recovery has the features like wipe cache, Dalvik cache, reset factory settings. The stock recovery is a minimal, limited system. It’s designed to be ignored, and it can generally only flash OTA updates and ROMs provided by the device’s manufacturer, not third-party ROMs.  Stock ROM has less functionality. For this reason we use the ROM called as “Custom ROM”.

Fig2: Recovery screen

A custom recovery is a third-party recovery environment. Flashing this recovery environment onto your device replaces the default, stock recovery environment with a third-party, customized recovery environment.  A custom recovery environment does same things as the stock Android recovery does but in addition it provides some extra features. Custom recoveries have the ability to create and restore device backups. Custom recoveries allow installing custom ROMs.

                                               Fig3: Stock Recovery screen

Although CWM and TWRP are the two most popular custom recoveries, but other custom recoveries may be available for some devices.

Custom recoveries mainly fall in various categories:

1)     ClockworkMod Recovery (CWM):

CVM is the most widely used and popular recovery. It offers an application called as “ROM MANAGER”, which allows easily browsing and installing custom ROMs. CVM can restore and create. It is supported by most of the devices. CVM is widely used recovery.

Features of custom recovery:

1)     Fix permissions.

2)     Wipe cache, Dalvik cache.

3)     Wipe data.

4)     Reset factory settings

5)     Nandroid backup and restore.

6)     Install zips from internal or external sources.

7)     Used to install custom kernels or custom ROMs.

8)     Mounting.

9)     Formatting system partitions.

10)Preload.

How to install these custom ROMs:

Installing ROM varies from devices to devices. It depends on the properties of the device. Procedure for installing the custom ROM suiting your phone you can Google your model number and name.

Fig4: ROM manager screen

Purpose of custom recovery:

Custom recoveries are most useful while installing custom ROMs on device, as they provide backup, restore, and ROM-flashing features you’ll need. The device boot loader needs to be unlocked. Android offer a way to create full device backups, although this feature is hidden and requires using an adb command. One need not unlock the boot loader, install a custom ROM, or even root device to create or restore a full backup. 

 Fig5: Custom based recovery screen

2)     Team win recovery(TWRP):

Team Win Recovery project is a touch-based recovery environment. TWRP environment has a touch-based interface which one can use by tapping his fingers on on-screen buttons. TWRP even supports themes. TWRP offers ROM installation and backup features.

Fig6: TWRP based recovery

I hope the newbie like me are aware now of the what all the Android recovery consists of and its well known types. Last but not the least for this blog i would like to thank my friend Sagar R Aradwad for guiding me a walkthrough by giving a live demo of all the stages of custom recovery on my cell phone.

Switching to Root without Root Password

Hello Linux geeks, today I would like to share one trick with you that will always help you out when you need root access but you don't have it's password. Here I am considering that you know basic stuffs about root, administrator and normal user access/permissions. To get root access you know at least the administrator password, because this is not a hacking it's a ethical trick. So just follow the following basic steps to gain root access.

Getting Android 4.3 on Samsung Galaxy S2 GT-i9100 -- Part 1

Part 1 - Rooting Your Phone

Galaxy S2 GT-i9100

All the people who have Samsung Galaxy S2 with them will not be getting an update to Android version 4.3 Jellybean from Samsung Galaxy S2 GT-i9100. But you can always flash the Jellybean firmware by flashing the firmware manually. After flashing you may not get the look of Samsung phone, but you will be having the latest firmware running on your device with the looks of Google Nexus. And its really worth it, as you get all the features of latest version of Android. But the downside is, your phone would be Rooted.

OPENSSH-SERVER

SSH is program to login into remote computer in Network. You can have all accessibility when you logged into remote computer. This is done by Linux terminal. You can also login from Windows to Linux System but you must have the Public key and password of the remote System, but for Linux you just need password of remote system. As I mention in the  beginning of this blog SSH is a program from which you can login into remote System. But it is must that Remote System must have Openssh-server installed in its system.

You can read more about SSH program by typing “man ssh” on your Linux terminal, as shown below.

Fig :1

In above image you can see at left most corner is given “SSH(1)”, that 1 means its “Executable programs or shell commands”. In Linux there are different types of programs that run on Linux Terminal. For example there is one command that is “kill()” which can be use for two different purposes.

You can check program type by typing on terminal “man man”, it shows following output on terminal as below.

Fig : 2

As mention we must have Openssh-server on Remote system, following is an example for installing Openssh-server in your system.

For installing openssh-server:

    sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Fig :3

You can also download openssh-server(any package) instead of installing it for later use.

For downloading openssh-server:

        sudo apt-get download openssh-server

Fig:4

Now, to connect to remote System you have to type on your terminal,

          ssh -4 IP_Address_of_Remote_System

Fig:5

In above command I used “-4”, which indicate that it's a IPV4, for IPV6 use “-6”. When you'll try to login into Remote host, it will ask for the Remote account password for security purpose. After logged into Remote Host you can have all access to Remote host on your terminal. But for Administrative or root access you must know it's password. To access as Administrative or root you can switch to that account by typing on terminal:

      su account_name

It will ask you the password for the same account. After entering into that account you can have access as Admin or root.

Many times it happened that you login as Admin but you can't use some commands like poweroff . So for that purpose just try following command,

       sudo poweroff

Here, it will ask for the Admin Account password, type it and then you can use some of the root command easily.

Reset Forgotten Root Password

Hi readers, nowadays there are people who forget their password, as they use multiple operating system, in which ubuntu is one of the most important OS that is used. We need super user authority to install or uninstall a package in ubuntu, where root has all the authorities. If I case we forget the root password then it would be a great trouble for us, and so we need to reset out root password, this can be done in six simple steps which are as follows:

1. When you see the options in menu shown below.

2.Select the option and press “e” to edit the text which can be seen in

figure below

 3. Go to the sentence and edit the sentence “ro quite splash” as

“rw init=/bin/bash”

  4.Now press F10 or Clt + x to reboot the system you will find that you are logged in as root.

  6.Now you can set your password using command,

passwd root

XPrivacy - Xposed Framework Module

About XPrivacy

In  earlier post, I had explained about Xposed Installer and OpenPDroid. The former explaining about modifying your ROM without modifying an APK or flashing a custom ROM, and the latter explaining about protecting your privacy and providing fake or null information to the apps that access your private data.

Now, today I'm going to explain about a combination of both Xposed and OpenPDroid. Yeah, enter XPrivacy module for Xposed Framework.  Wondering what is it?

I am going to explain about it in a minute, read on..!!

XPrivacy can be used as an alternative to OpenPDroid, though not as restrictive as OpenPDroid can be, but still is a great option for those who cannot patch their ROM to run OpenPDroid. XPrivacy can be used to prevent applications from accessing your private sensitive data.

XPrivacy does this by providing an application with null or fake data.

XPrivacy does not block the permissions of an application, it just provides the application with fake data, hence there'll be no problem of a particular application getting force closed because of using XPrivacy.

If providing fake or null data to an application causes problems in working of an application, then the same can be reversed. By default, all newly-installed applications will not be allowed to access any data, so that any new application cannot leak any sensitive data after its installation. After every application installation, XPrivacy will prompt to ask for the data you want the application to have access to.

As the developer of the XPrivacy module says, XPrivacy will monitor attempts made by all applications to access sensitive data. XPrivacy will highlight (with a yellow triangle) a data category for an application (or an application name in the application browser) as soon as data of the data category has been used. XPrivacy will also display if an application has internet access, indicating that the application poses a risk of sharing the data it obtains with an external server. If an application has requested Android permissions to access data in a data category, it will also be displayed (with a green tick), but this will only be shown when looking at an individual application, since checking permissions for all applications is quite slow.

XPrivacy is built using the Xposed framework. XPrivacy taps into a number of selected functions of Android through the Xposed framework. Depending on the function, XPrivacy conditionally skips execution of the original function (for example when an application tries to set a proximity alert) or alters the result of the original function (for example to return empty calendar data).

Installation of XPrivacy

1.    Requires Android Jelly Bean (4.1 and above) and rooted phone.

2.    Requires Xposed Framework installed.

3.    Download XPrivacy and Xposed fix for your Android version from  here.

4.    Enable XPrivacy in Xposed Installer > Modules tab.

5.    Reboot into Recovery mode.

6.    Flash Xposed fix for the version of Android.

7.    Reboot your phone.

If you have any queries, feel free to comment.!!

Xposed Framework – Modifying Android without Modifying System Files/Applications

In my previous posts, I have explained what is Custom ROM and the advantages of using them. But now, a developer named rovo89, has developed a framework for Android which would give you the possibility to modify your existing Android ROM without modifying any APK or ROM flashing, the only thing that Xposed Framework requires is root access. Xposed Framework allows you to make small tweaks to existing Android operating system without replacing it.

Working of Xposed Framework

To make various changes, developers modify the system files, to be precise, system APKs, and developers make the changes and release them in custom ROMs. To use the changes made by developers, users have to flash custom ROM on their device.

To install Xposed Framework, root access is required, but after installation it should work without root access. From the words of developer himself:

“I extended the /system/bin/app_process executable to load a JAR file on startup. The classes of this file will sit in every process (including the one for system services) and can act with their powers. And even more: I have implemented something that allows developers to replace any method in any class (may it be in the framework, systemui or a custom app). This makes Xposed very powerful. You can change parameters for the method call, modify the return value or skip the call to the method completely - it's all up to you! Also replacing or adding resources is easy.”

Xposed Framework works with almost all Android devices with Android version 4.0 and later, and also the device should have ARM processor. Sadly, if you have a Gingerbread version on your device, or a device with an Intel processor, you are out of luck.

How to Install Xposed Framework

First of all, make sure your device is rooted. The root access is required by Xposed framework for installation. Then take a Nandroid Backup of your device, as in the case of unexpected consequences, you can always restore to the state your device was at earlier.

You need to download the APK file attached to this forum: Xposed - ROM modding without modifying APKs, and install the APK on your Android device.

After its installation, open the Xposed Installer app and press the Install/Update button to install the Xposed Framework. Now, the app requires Root Access.

After installation, press the Reboot button to reboot your device and the Xposed Framework will become active.

You can also uninstall the Xposed Framework by returning to Xposed Installer app and pressing the Uninstall or Clean up button. This would reverse the changes made to the app_process executable in your device.

Xposed Modules

The Xposed framework provides a base for various modules to do their work. After installation of the Xposed framework, you'll need some other apps to actually do modifications to your device.

There are many modules available on various forums. You can check here for a list of available modules using Xposed: List of Xposed Apps and Modules.

The Xposed Framework is useful for people who don't want to risk flashing Custom ROM or want Stock ROM with some modifications. The installation of Xposed Framework and its modules do not require using Custom ROM's or changing the device firmware and the changes to system made by them can be easily restored to factory defaults at a click of a button.

All the Best on using Xposed Framework..!!

Rooting an Android Phone: Benefits and Risks

For Starters

Whenever we get an Android device, there are lots of restrictions put to the user by the phone/device manufacturer. Though, Android is an open source platform, the device manufacturer provide the device with many already loaded software which we may not need or even the manufacturer may disable a few features so as to keep the cost of the device low.

Rooting an Android means gaining administrative privileges on the system or you can say, gaining root access on the system. When we buy an Android phone and use it, we are basically just a guest user of Android OS. We cannot make any changes to the system files of the OS, because we cannot access the Android root folder.

When we have gained root access on our phone, we can browse the Android root folder and make changes to the system files on our phone. And hence we can make all kinds of changes, even those restricted by the device manufacturer, which is why after rooting your phone, its warranty is null and void. There are many powerful applications available for users to use after rooting the Android phone, which we cannot use on a non-rooted phone.

Manufacturers mostly stop providing updated OS for the device after a few years of its launch, which may deny the user of experiencing new features provided in new OS and may leave the user unsatisfied. But if you rooted your phone, you can install an alternative OS, a developer-made version of OS, popularly known as Custom ROMs that would offer you to install latest Android OS on your phone even though the manufacturer has denied support for it.

After rooting, we can also over clock the processor inside the device, thus getting better performance from our device. By over clocking, we can use some apps freely which otherwise would work very slowly on our device. If you desire a powerful device, you can install a Custom ROM with inbuilt over clocking features.

Here now, I'll be sharing benefits and risks of rooting your phone and where you can find great Custom ROMs.

Rooting?

Rooting is a process that provides users with full control and access to an Android device. Rooting is often done to avoid/override the limitations done by the device manufacturer. Once root access is achieved, we can replace or change applications, system settings, run special apps, etc.

After rooting, we will be able to install Custom ROMs, replace our original OS with another version of OS that would give us more control over the device and its settings. That's popularly known as "Flashing a Custom ROM".

So, how to root my Android phone?

The process of rooting an Android phone is different for different devices. The most common method is to flash a kernel with root access.

Rooting voids the device warranty, but even after rooting if you flash a stock ROM, everything's back to their original state. So don’t worry.

Why?

After rooting, you can remove any unwanted applications and games that the device manufacturer installed before you purchased the phone. And thus you can free up some space on your Android phone for some more applications that you may need.

After rooting, you can update your phone to latest version of Android faster than your phone manufacturer provides it to you. From the time Google announces a new Android version to the time your device manufacturer provides it for your device, it would take around a few months or longer.

After rooting, you can make complete backup of your device to restore it later on your phone. We can add many features to our phone that were disabled by manufacturer or not provided by manufacturer. We can also improve the battery life of our phone by fiddling with the new controls of the phone.

Risks?

The biggest risk in rooting an Android device is that it will void the manufacturer's warranty. If you've flashed a custom ROM on your phone and there's a problem with your phone, then the manufacturer won't be happy to help you or may even charge you more.

Anyways, there's always a "RESTORE" option available, you can always flash a Stock ROM, and make the device as you got it from the manufacturer, back to "ORIGINAL STATE", and the manufacturer/service centre guys won't be able to figure out if you ever fiddled with your phone.

WARNING! If you make any mistake in steps to flash a ROM/Kernel, there's a chance that you will BRICK your phone, which means that your phone would be no better than a brick on the road.

You should be reading everything about a particular custom ROM/Kernel, before flashing it, so you know what you should be doing in case you run into a problem. If you are a member of any forums related to this, read all the replies to check if there are any problems with the ROM with your particular device.

Places to Find Help

I am member of following forums:

XDA developers

Rootzwiki

I would also recommend you to join these forums for getting help about rooting and custom ROMs.

Read all the details in these forums about what you're going to do, and understand it before doing it.

Custom ROMs

Custom ROMs are firmware, made by other developers, for Android devices that provide features that are not found in the stock Android OS. They are often built from the official files of Android or kernel source code.

Popular custom ROMs are CyanogenMod, Paranoid Android, MIUI , AOKP  (Android Open Kang Project).

There are many other custom ROMs available, you can check the above given forums for many more custom ROMs.

CyanogenMod is the most famous of all the Custom ROMs. They support many numbers of devices and the ROM they provide looks similar to the Stock Android OS.

Special Applications

There are many apps that would require root access and provide you with extra device management and functions other than what the Stock OS provides.

Even if you don't want to install a Custom ROM, after rooting you can install these special applications to get better functionality from your phone. Applications like ROM Toolbox Lite, Titanium Backup, ROM Manager and ES File Explorer.

Take a Backup

It is always better to take a complete backup of your phone before getting to Flashing ROMs/Kernels. They'll help you in case you get a problem with the ROM/Kernel you flash. It is always better to take a backup and test it before flashing a Custom ROM.

Finally

Rooting and flashing may seem a bit too complicated, but don't worry, there are huge number of users in the forums who will be happy to help you out of trouble. Even though, the process of rooting differs with the device, it isn't as complicated as it may sound.

At last, it depends on you and your usage, if you want to root your phone or not.

Being able to try out new features and new OS versions has always fascinated me and hence I rooted and am running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean on my Samsung Galaxy S2 even though Samsung officially provided only Android 4.1.2 for my device till date.

I am enjoying it. What about you?

Leave comments if you have any difficulty in rooting and flashing a Samsung Phone..!! ALL THE BEST...!!

Connecting USB modem in Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10

Hi Ubuntu Users, you might just install the newly fresh Ubuntu 12.04 or Ubuntu 12.10, but you might not get the connection to internet by using USB modem. You can’t directly connect internet connection by just plugging USB device and setting the internet connection. Ubuntu developers and Canonical Community didn’t notice the small bug of network connection manager, the problem is that modem does not get detected, so we can’t setup to the internet settings. So in this blog I will be publishing a very simple technique to connect to the Internet connection by using USB modem.

 

If you have just installed the Ubuntu the first step is to create the root account in Ubuntu because Ubuntu and Debian based operating Systems doesn’t have the root account. So we will have to create it by just entering the following command,

  

     Sudo passwd

Entering this command on terminal will ask you for password and it will create a root account with the same password.

Now you have to login as a super user, so enter the following command

   Su

Enter your root password

Now, you have to plug your USB modem

After plugging, check if your modem is mounted or not by the following command

   lsusb

 

This command will list all the drives and USB devices of your system.

Just check your USB is mounted or not. It is mounted but not detected, so for settingup internet connection enter the following command:

   modprobe –v option

modpobe is a command to add and remove modules from Linux Kernel.

-v  --verbose

Print messages about what the program is doing. Usually modprobe only prints messages if something goes wrong. This option is passed through install or remove commands to other modprobe commands in the MODPROBE_OPTIONS environment variable.

After that you just have to enter the following command

echo"1c9e 9605" > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/option1/new_id

 

This command will write the entry for the modem in the new_id file

That’s all now your modem is detected and you can set up your internet connection through network manager.