This is for you, if you would rather try out ICS right now, but can’t afford a Google Nexus phone, or don’t see any reason why you should update if you already own the Galaxy S 2
The CyanogenMOD team is working hard on their 9th version, and one of the devs, codeworkx, has been putting together experimental builds and fixes daily since right after christmas.

Not everything is in place yet, as this is an early experimental build (alpha), and lots of bugs remain to squash, but I have tried the rom, and it is actually quite good and stable for being an alpha! So, depending on your needs, you can actually use this as your daily rom, like I currently do.

This guide assumes you already have some knowledge about flashing roms, and it is recommended to have a working ClockWorkMod, like the version that comes with CyanogenMOD 7.

I am not responsible for anything that happens to you or your phone if you decide to try this.

And I will not do support for this in the comments.

(Problems can be discussed in the IRC channel linked in the xda thread, or here)

Installation instructions

The whole thread and download links can be found over at xda here.

Im just going to summarize the procedure:

1. Copy GApps, Faceunlock and CM9 ZIPs to your internal SDCard
2. Boot into Recovery
3. Flash the CM9 zip
4. Flash GApps and Faceunlock ZIPs
5. DO A DATA WIPE / FACTORY RESET
6. Reboot

I was using CyanogenMOD 7, with CWM, and using the 01032012 build (january 3, 2012), I could flash the ROM directly, without having to use a ICS bootloader, which you had to use with the earlier builds.  I also flashed the XXKP8 Modem right after the GApps and facelock zips, but it is said to be not neccesary. I did not need Odin for anything during this procedure.

These steps worked fine. Although there are a couple of quirks you may stumble upon…

Quirks and stuff

Including this list of bugs, heres a list of different quirks, and solutions, that is not present in the post on the front page:

• If Google maps is giving a “Login failed” message, you have to give it permissions (it should pop up from the notification bar), this has to be done 3 times (for 3 different permissions). You may have to exit and re-launch the app many times for this to work. It took me 5 minutes before I got it working.
• If none of the Google apps gets installed, besides GMail, you can download them from the market
• To make app installation easier, try logging in to market.android.com in your desktop browser, and install apps directly onto your phone.
• If the scrolling in menus is sometimes lagging, you can fix this by going to: Settings -> Developers option -> Force gpu rendering
• If you later decide to update the rom to a newer build, you just need to flash the rom, GApps and the facelock zip, then wipe cache, you do not need to flash the modem again.
• The newer builds can be flashed from newer versions of CWM, ICS bootloader is not needed.
• If the phone gets hot, or dont want to go to deep sleep, you have to kill the media and google services: On the home screen, press the menu button -> Manage apps -> And stop the media service.
• To transfer files, if the Media Transfer Protocol doesn’t work, you can use Droid Explorer to transfer files.
• Taking screenshots on the device is a little weird… Hold down the power button for about 1 second, then you get the menu, choose screenshot.

The new ADT version brings some nice touches to the layout editor.

Now you can select items and drag and drop them onto the layout. It’s a nice touch that will certainly help new android developers a lot.

To get the new features, in eclipse go to Help and then Check for updates.

You can read more in the ADT changelog.

They have also tweaked the XML formatting. Which is always a good thing

I ran a quick test with a drawer layout on Android 4.0:

I had the presentation lying around, so I thought I’d publish it
(with permission from the other group members).

You can download the PowerPoint version with notes here.

You can download the PDF version here.
 

You are using a webserver like apache2 or lighttpd to host websites under the /var/www directory, and letting your linux users upload and edit the files in their home folder via ftp.

Each user use their own domain, and maybe you have set up virtualhosts in apache2.

That is a convenient way to host multiple sites for multiple people, but, you may have a problem if you are using the traditional symlink between the two folders; users home directory, and the webservers default root directory.

Say you have 2 users, with 2 different websites:

User Jen:

• Home folder:  /home/Jen
• Documentroot, virtualhost: /var/www/jen.com

User Alex:

• Home folder: /home/Alex
• Documentroot, virtualhost: /var/www/alex.com

And you are using vsftpd, with the setting chroot_local_user=YES so that users are limited to their own home folder.

You could then create a symlink ( ln -s ) between /home/Alex/alex.com and /var/www/alex.com so Alex could manage his website from his home directory. that would work, but not via ftp, since it does not follow symlinks outside Alex’s home folder.

Solution

This took me some time to figure out, but the solution is actually simple.

Instead of using the traditional symlink, you can in linux mount two folders like this:

Make sure the directories /home/Alex/alex.com and /var/www/alex.com exists (create them with mkdir)

Then mount the two folders with mount –bind  /home/Alex/alex.com /var/www/alex.com

Now Alex should be able to update his website files in his home folder, via ftp, and at the same time, apache can serve his website from the default /var/www directory (ubuntu default).

A workaround

This is a simpler workaround, a solution, but not to the specific problem of giving ftp users access.

Instead of symlinking or mounting directories between apaches www folder and users home folder, you could just point the documentroot of the apache virtualhosts to /home/Alex/alex.com or /home/Jen/jen.com instead.

But then you scatter your webfiles around the server, and make running backups harder.

This is the landing page for the Google +1 extension for Opera.

You can download the extension here.

Update:
I have recently updated the extension, it should now be working properly again!

Features:

With this extension you can view the Google +1 rating of the current website, and also you can +1 the site by clicking the +1 button.

The links in the bottom, gives some information when you mouse over.

Mouse over the “Url” link to see the current address for which the +1 rating is.

Google +1

If you have questions, feedback, bugs etc, feel free to report them here.

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This is the landing page for the Google Maps extension for Opera.

You can download the extension here.

The extension allows you to select a street address, and hit the button, to get a full dynamic Google Map for the location.

Google Maps extension for Opera

I just (11 June) submitted an update to go through the review process, the update includes:

• user interface improvement.
• editbox to change the selected address or just do a regular map search.
• type or change the address in the editbox, and just hit enter to search.
• latitude and longitude koordinates should work.

The new interface now looks like this:

The new version 2.0

Street view and all other map features also work:

Street view

If you have questions, feedback, bugs etc, feel free to report them here.

More information to come.

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It requires about 100 MB of free ram, or preferably more (250MB or so, if you can afford it). Since most systems today have 4 GB ram, setting aside 200MB should not be a problem.

First up, we need to create a ramdisk

After lots of searching, I found a program that works well, and does exactly what I need, the utility is called RAMDisk, created by Dataram.

Features:

• It gives you a free personal ramdisk up to 4 GB in size, without registration, which is more than enough.
• It works on Win7 and Vista, both x32 and x64 bit, and win XP
• It works pretty well after having tested it for a couple of days.

The installation of RAMDisk is pretty straightforward, so Im not going to go through that.

The setup

Setting up the ramdisk is pretty easy.

1. Choose the RAMDisk size in MB.
2. Choose a Fat32 partition.
3. Click Start RAMDisk

You should now have a RAMDisk ready to use:

Configuring the volatile RAMDisk so it becomes non-volatile

The way the RAMDisk is set up for now, it will delete all files on the RAMDisk when it is stopped (volatile).

If you want the files to be stored, you can click on the Load and Save tab, where we can set the content of the disk, to be loaded and stored at startup and shutdown, to an image file.

If you now check “Save Disk Image on shutdown”, give it a filename, and press “Save disk image now”, then it will create the image of your RAMDisk. The image will be the same size as your RAMDisk.

Then, check the box, “Load Disk Image at Startup”, specify you image file, and optionally give your disk a label, “Ramdisk” or something describing.

Then go to File -> Save settings.

Your RAMDisk should now be properly set up, it should load when you start your computer, and save the contents to the image file on shutdown.

And we can now configure Opera.

Setting up Opera to use the RAMDisk

Ok, this is the easy part:

1. Open a new tab in Opera.
2. Paste this into the url bar, and press enter: opera:config#UserPrefs|CacheDirectory4
3. This will take you to the configuration page, to change your cache directory.
   (Alternatively just enter opera:config, press enter, and search for “cache”
4. Now create a folder on your RAMDisk, called “operacache” or something.
5. Enter the path to your “operacache” folder, on your RAMDisk, in the “Cache Directory4″ settings.
6. Remember to hit Save at the bottom of the “User prefs” settings list!
   
7. Restart Opera.

Now, if this is properly set up, there should be cache files popping up in your “operacache” directory when you are browsing the internet. Something like this:

That tells us this is working!

And depending on how fast your computer is, you may notice a difference in page load times (from cache).

Note: Of course, webpages will not load faster the first time you visit them, since the bottleneck will be your internet connection.

Benchmarking the RAMDisk

Just for the fun of it, I did small and quick benchmark on my RAMDisk with Atto disk benchmark.

These are the results, compared to the regular harddrive, to the right:

Now hopefully you can enjoy a little bit faster web browsing

Thank you.
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