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.

According to the Box.net blog, owners of LG phones can get a Box.net account for free.

Box.net is a file storage and synchronization service, which is more suited for buisnesses, indication that it may in some cases replace Sharepoint.
(I have not yet tested Box.net)

For LG phones, you have to have Android 2.1 or better.

All you have to do is just install the Box.net Android app from the market, and you will get 50GB free storage and synchronization!

(You will have to create and account when you are logging in.)

Some clever guys over at xda also made a workaround so you can get Box.net even if you don’t have a LG phone. But this method is meant for more xperienced users.

This article will guide you through the setup of Android 4.0 in virtualbox. It will work a lot smoother than through the AVD.

There are a couple of steps in this guide, but they are straightforward and easy to follow.

1. Start by downloading the iso image from here.
2. In Virtualbox, create a new virtual machine, select Linux as Operating System, and Other Linux as the version.
3. You can now press next all the way, to finish the creation. Default settings will work.
4. Go into settings for the virtual machine, and put the downloaded iso into the “cd-tray”
   
5.  Start up the virtual machine, and hit Install android-x86 to harddisk
   
6. Go to Create/modify partitions, new, primary, just use the default size, then click bootable to set the bootable flah on the partition. Click Write, type yes, and then hit Enter. And Quit.
7. We have now created the partition to use, and you will see this image:
   
8. Select the sda1 Linux partition, and hit ok. Choose ext3 as filesystem, and hit ok.
9. When asked if you want to do a format, select yes, also say yes to installing grub, but no to install /system as read-write.
10. At the end, select Run android-x86 and your Android 4.0 virtual machine will come to life!
11. While booting, it will show a lot of text and commands like this:
    
    That was where my booting stopped. To be able to interact with the virtual machine with your mouse, you have to first turn off the mouse capturing in the virtual machines window:
    
    To be able to escape the mouse from the capturing (if you have clicked inside the virtual machine), press your right CTRL key on your keyboard.
12. Since I was stuck while booting, I clicked Machine -> ACPI Shutdown.
    Android 4.0 then made a jump to the welcome screen, and asked me if I wanted to power off my device, since it had now gotten to the welcome screen, I selected Cancel, and continued through the welcome setup. Weird!
    
13. After just walking through the short welcome process, I got to the homescreen, and could finally play around!
     

When you are done playing around, and want to shut down the virtual machine, just go to Machine -> ACPI shutdown.

The performance is a lot better using this method, rather than the emulation that comes with the Android SDK.

Although as a little downside, I have not found any way to enable networking to the virtual machine.

Here are a couple of other screencaps

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:

At the same time, the Android 4.0 SDK was released into the wild. 

Here I will show you how to already get it up and running, so you can try it out, and start developing/adapting your Android apps for ICS. It will give you a nice “hands on” feeling for ICS

The steps in this post is quite similar to the post I wrote earlier about trying out Honeycomb.

If you want a faster working solution, but for the time being without internet connection, you can check out my post on how to install Android 4.0 in virtualbox.

1. You start by opening the Android SDK and AVD manager
2. It will automatically check for updates:
   
3. Choose to install Android SDK Tools, revision 14 and Android SDK Platform-tools, revision 8. After installation, you have to restart the Android SDK manager. It may also look like this:
   
4. After restarting ADB, create a new Android device, and give it these settings:
   
5. Select your new AVD and hit Start:
   
6. After some loading (yes, it takes some time), you get the following screen:
   
7. Congratulations, you can now play with Ice Cream Sandwich!

 

 

Android 4.0 certainly looks nice, so I hope it will spread quickly.

You can find more information on Android 4.0 at developer.android.com. And on the android-developers blog.

For developers: The User agent for Ice Cream Sandwich seems to be

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.1; en-us; sdk Build/ICS_MR0) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30

Please share this post!

I will be demonstrating this on a Galaxy S 2, with Opera Mobile 11.10 on Android  and Opera desktop version 11.50.

This is Opera Mobile, not Mini, which is a different browser.

This will not work for iPhone or iPad since Opera Mobile is not allowed into App store since it is too “similar to safari”.

As we developers know, it is quite difficult and cumbersome to inspect a websites source code, css, javascript or layout, from a mobile browser, like you can in a desktop browser with tools like Firebug.

Dragonfly is a tool that can be used to debug and edit websites on your mobile device, from your desktop computer.

I will be showing how to connect to your phone, and start debugging away!

Dragonfly

• Dragonfly is Operas version of Firebug and Chrome developer tools.
• It comes bundled with the desktop version of Opera.
• It is a webapp, which automatically updates itself.
• You can open it by pressing Ctrl + Shift + I or by clicking the main menu -> Page- Developer tools -> Dragonfly

Connecting for Remote debugging

1. When you have opened Dragonfly on your computer, click on the “Remote debug configuration” button, set a port number (default 7001 should work in most cases), and hit apply.
   
2. Find the local IP address of your computer
3. Connect your phone to the same network as your computer, by wifi.
4. Open Opera Mobile on your phone, and go to about:debug in the url bar.
   
5. Enter the ip address and port number of your computer, and hit “connect”.

If it connects properly, Dragonfly should start loading the html of the currently active website in Opera Mobile, which will be the “Connect to debugger” website where we hit the connect button. It will look something like this:

If you expand the DOM, and mouse over or click the H1 tag (like I did in the picture), you should see the header beeing selected in Opera Mobile, on you phone!

Doing some editing

Now I can for example edit the header of the website, by double clicking it, and entering some new text.

Debugging another website

Now, this was just for demonstration, you probably want to debug or mess with some other website,  you can do this by going to a new url in the address bar on Opera Mobile. You cannot open other websites in tabs on your phone, to debug another site, you must use the same tab, just change the url. (edit: Yes you can! see comments below)

Stopping debugging & some tips

Console and Undocking

So I thought I would test it out, connecting a USB stick to my Galaxy S2.

This was really straightforward, so theres not much explaining to do here.

1. Put some content on your usb stick, like a movie, some pictures or a sound track.
2. Put the usb stick into the OTG adapter, and then the OTG adapter into the phone.
3. Browse the content of the usb stick with your favourite file browser app (I used Astro)
   You find the contents of the usb stick under /mnt/sdcard/usbStorage/sda

This is great if you need some extra capacity, want to bring with you files, copy and paste from/to the phone, etc.

For example if you want to login and edit the database via HeidiSQL or other mysql tools.

CREATE USER 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
CREATE USER 'username'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;

These commands will create a user called “username” with the password “password”, which has both local and remote access.

Took me some time to figure it out initially.

Debugging websites in a browser on a computer is easy with all the good tools available, such as Firebug in Firefox, Webkit inspector in Chrome and  Dragonfly in Opera. But mobile devices doesn’t have any such tool. What do you do then?

That was my problem the other day, a div  element on the website rendered for iPhone got the wrong styles, so I had to investigate…

Which was not easily done from the iPhone Safari browser, to say atleast.

(And the solution was not as easy as just browsing the mobile website on my computer with iOS user agent.)

A buddy of mine had just recently come over a tool called weinre. Funny name, yes, but a very handy tool to debug websites on mobile devices!

About Weinre

• Weinre stands for “Web Inspector Remote” and is similar to the web inspector in chrome.
• It will allow you to use the inspector (run on your computer), on the website rendered on your mobile device!
• Changes you do in the inspector, are reflected instantly in the mobile devices browser. (such as changing text, color, dimension etc) just as in FireBug.
• You also get a javascript command line.
• Weinre is a simple jar file, you run through the command line.

It has a lot of documentation on its website, maybe too much, so I thought I would try to cook it down to a few simple steps to get up and running quickly.

How to run weinre

1. Start with downloading weinre here.
2. Find your local ip adress by opening a command prompt, and enter ipconfig.
3. Then enter java -jar weinre.jar -httpPort 8081 -boundHost -all- in the command prompt to start weinre
   

   weinre running

4. With Chrome browser, openhttp://127.0.0.1:8081/which will take you to weinres interface, which looks like this:
   

   Weinres webinterface

5. And then open http://127.0.0.1:8081/client/ in another tabs. This is where you will do the website inspection, once the mobile device is connected.
6. On your mobile device, on the same network (wifi on), enter your computers local ip followed by port 8081 in the url.
   Something like this: 192.168.0.105:8081
7. You should then see the weinre website on your mobile device, like pictured above.
8. Scroll down on your device, and copy the bookmarklet text:

   javascript:(function(e){e.setAttribute("src","http://192.168.1.105:8081/target/target-script-min.js#anonymous");document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(e);})(document.createElement("script"));void(0);
   

   Where 192.168.1.105 automatically points to the local ip of your computer, so don’t worry

9. The goal is to create a bookmark with this code. On iPhone, create a new bookmark, save it, then go and edit it. Then you can paste in the javascript code above as the bookmarks adress. A little bit complex, but it works.
10. Go to the website you want to debug, then open the bookmarks, and click our newly created bookmark. this should run the javascript which connects to weinre on your computer.

The game is on, and you should now be able to edit the website with the webinspector, that is the last tab we opened in chrome: http://127.0.0.1:8081/client/ just hit the big green “Elements” button on top.

Press the "Elements" button

That button will open the inspector for you to toy around in. If you look closer at this image, you can see me editing the article header of this website, which is loaded on the mobile device.

Any changes you do in the inspector will reflect on the mobile device (here, iPhone 3GS), just like Firebug works for firefox:

Before editing the article header. (The gray box around the header is automatically applied when you hover an item in the web inspector.)

After editing the header

This ingenius tool helped me debug a website I was working on, so I wanted to share it with everyone

Please share this article.

Why Kies sucks

First of all, The Kies installation process is not very elegant;

• Its a 50+ MB package with alot of stuff you don’t want or need, such as an integrated music player.
• Drivers not getting installed properly
• About one hundred DLLs (no exaggeration!) not getting registered, each giving me an error message to click “OK” on…
• Kies couldn’t handle a custom installation directory
• And then theres the labels in korean or whatever:

When I finally managed to install Kies (and its 3 running background services…) it wouldn’t detect my phone. Great.

Updating firmware with Odin instead

This is the easiest way of updating you phone.

Its pretty well explained in 8 simple steps here.

But a quick summary:
(I take no responsibility for this.)

1. Find your new firmware version and download the file from the links
2. Extract the file, so that you now have a .tar file.
3. Download and run the Odin software from the provided link (200KB)
4. Reboot the phone to download mode
   To do this, turn the phone off, then simultaneously press the volume down key, the home button and then press the power button. If you see a warning, press the volume up button to continue.
5. In Odin, click the button named “PDA” and select your .tar file (your rom).
   If the rom has several files, also put in the PDA, Phone/Modem and CSC files. but do NOT put in a .pit file.
6. Connect the phone to the computer with usb cable, and wait till ID:COM turns yellow.
7. Click the “Start” button, and Odin will flash your rom.

As simple as that.

When the flashing is done, your phone will reboot itself.

There are several different roms available for Galaxy S2, I am currently using Litening rom, which I am very happy with.
Edit: If you flash the litening rom, you will get root

Edit2: The litening rom has been discontinued, but someone picked up and continued the development in another thread here, under the name UltraToxic rom.

CyanogenMOD have also come with nightly builds, which mean they are putting effort into making the rom stable enough for everyday use.