I’m a newbie and I try to execute this command “rm -rf” with the root privileges in root path.
- I try it on the emulator but the emulator freezes.
- I try it on the real device but nothing happens, the terminal seem to execute the command and return a new prompt line.
Thank you.

I’m not really sure what else to say…

Almost straight after my last Android post regarding my disappointment in HTC’s delay in their release of the promised Android 2.x release for the Hero (or Dream/G1, Magic/Sapphire, etc).  Thanks to a leaked build for the HTC Eris, dropped by a sketchy HTC staff member (or perhaps a creative community-driven beta testing process), a torrent of new custom Hero ROM’s were released.  Like always, each is slightly different with software/apps included or removed, and installed special optimisations, bug fixes and kernel hacks.

Since the 2nd of March:

• VillianROM v3.x by @nprussell
  • Creator of the fantastic clean Vanillian Vanilla build (new version soon)
  • Many versions released with many optimisations, bug fixes and handy included apps
• BeHero 1.2.x by @benocharm (1.3 on the way based on HTC Legend build – see below)
• HeroDroid v0.4 by @MaXo
• Defiance 2.1 by TheAshMan
• Neo ROM v1.34 by alias_neo
• Raidroid 1.0 by @raiderx303
• Clean Eris4Hero by @LoxDev

Anyone who’s been around the Hero/Android scene would probably have seen many of these names, and choice always keeps things interesting, but as you can see from the brief descriptions above, apart from different bootscreen/design/installed apps the optimisations in each are almost the same.

Unfortunately the issue is, I believe, while we don’t have access to the complete driver set or an updated (Android 2.x friendly) kernel, true creativity and customisation of each individual ROM isn’t particularly easy, at least from this posters point of view.

Flash forward to tonight (9th March) and a new dump has been leaked, this time for the HTC Legend (newer phone with almost exactly the same hardware specification as the Hero, except for that sweet AMOLED screen), which appears to have even more of the new Eclair features missing from the previous build, as well as more bug fixes I’d imagine!

Nom, nom, nom..

Months on, however, HTC have still not released an office 2.1/Eclair update for the Hero platform, nor have they provided (i.e let slip) an updated 2.1 dump for the cooks to play with.  No doubt this is because of the release of the Nexus, Legend and Bravo, so as not to steal their thunder, but I’m betting it’s because they just don’t care.  And why should they?  In this day and age of Lacoste, Guiness and Apple fanboy-ism, brand loyalty means nothing….. right?

But who am I to complain right? I’ve heard the tired old argument about manufacturers releasing devices to the market with a whole lot of push and marketing to get buyers, then stopping support/upgrade path for them soon after release.  Many do it, look at Samsung (the Galaxy fizzled and died as soon as hit the shelf), and from what I’ve seen support from Acer for the Liquid has been no better.  But after all, HTC is no different to any other company, they exist for the money and I guess we shouldn’t expect more.

She’s “cool”, Apple win.. HTC, on the other hand.. don’t.

This will most certainly be my last £0/fee per month contract phone though.  I love it, but 18 months with one device is just too long.  In the future, I’ll foot the ~£500 price tag for a new phone and sell it six months later for £300 repeating the process over again.

Ashamedly, I realise that my lust for new hardware and device happiness has the equal effect of giving the manufacturer exactly what they want, and keeping them happy… many times over.

All the praise aside, nothings perfect, and my little Hero was no exception. In fact it suffers from the same ailment as many devices fall victim too, where hardware vendors release their products with poor/inefficient software. So without going into too much detail on the ROM, as I’ve done that before, I’ve come up with what my idea of the perfect setup is for a fast, secure, ultra useful phone that does everything for you.

The ROM

In my previous article about the Android ROM’s, I blogged about some of the ROM’s available for the Hero platform, the most mature and reliable definitely being MoDaCo’s custom ROM (now at version 3.2).  After trialling Android 2.0/2.1 ROM’s I didn’t want to go back to a cupcake build (Android 1.5) so I’ve settled on Kagudroid 1.0-beta, made by Lox of LoxDev fame, a ROM which aims to be as clean as possible built from the AOSP sources.  It’s Sense-less in that it doesn’t have any of the HTC SenseUI software on there so there’s RAM and general speed improvements and runs smoothly and fast.

Kagudroid 0.1beta (running on AOSP 2.0)

The Perfect-ly Obvious

They deserve a mention as they’re used almost more than anything else on the phone, but any of the google suite is an absolute must if your a google account holder.  GMail, Maps, Places Directory and Tasks are what I use most often, but Google Goggles (image searching) is pretty nifty.

The Perfect Set of Utilities

Due to wiping the phone so many times, I’ve got a a set of applications (as well as their DB’s, so I don’t have to set them up every time), which I load before booting the new ROM.  I consider them essential and it’s just not the same without them.

Locale – Event Driven Profiles

(http://www.twofortyfouram.com/)

Locale’s that profiles menu on your old Nokia 5110, revitalised in way that profile selection is made almost completely automatic, driven by an event system that can act on almost anything thing the phone does, like GPS location, WIFI availability, time, date, battery health, availability of networks/services, etc etc and hundreds of combinations of each.

The Locale Profile Screen

These are my standard set of profiles (in order of preference, as they’ll override each other):

• Bedtime - In the vicinity of ‘Home’ after 11pm on a week night, phone notifications are silent, GPS turned off and Alarms set on loud to make sure I wake up the following morning
• Home – In the vicinity of the house, WIFI and bluetooth on, and volume set to relatively low
• Low Battery – Triggered anytime the battery is below 20%, basically shuts down 3G/Wifi data, GPS and Screen time out to increase time until phone death
• Office - In the vicinity of the office, WIFI/Bluetooth on and phone almost on silent, screen timeout set on high and Screebl (see below) disabled
• Default – Phone on loud setting, GPS/WIFI on (for location services) but most other services off as they’re unused

See?  Infinitely useful, and I’m only just using the most basic of features.

Screebl

(http://www.keyeslabs.com/joomla/index.php/projects/screebl)

Screebl is a simple app with one purpose, it saves battery life by keeping the screen timeout as low as possible, but at the same time using the phones accelerometer to detect when the phone is being held and keep the screen on while using Google Maps, messaging, web browsing etc.  The new version (v2.0) includes Locale plugin support to change Screebl settings on Locale profile change.

Wavesecure – Security

(https://www.wavesecure.com/)

Wavesecure definitely deserves a mention, even though I’ve fortunately not had to use it’s most useful features.  It’s a security app, that runs constantly and checks into a remote server where if the phone is lost/stolen you can physically lock down the device to disable it, and if required wipe it clean to protect personal data.  It’ll also report phones location upon request and can backup files/SMS on a scheduled basis.

Advanced Task Manager

(http://arronla.com/)

Advanced Task Manager is perfect for keeping the phone running as quickly as possible at all times, by automatically closing all non essential apps and freeing up much needed RAM.

The Perfect Set of Apps

There’s a load of other apps I use as well on a constant basic, but may not be quite as essential as those listed above

Dolphin Browser

(http://www.dolphinbrower.com)

I’m yet to see the newest HTC and/or Android brower from Android 2.1, but Dolphin Browser is much better and fuller featured than the Cupcake browsers that I used, it’s got tabs (on the screen where you can see them), Google bookmark sync to help typing out those pesky web address’s and a simple to use gesture feature which make the touch screen experience even easier.

Twidroid (or Seesmic too for ping.fm support) – Twitter Clients

(http://www.twidroid.com)

What can I say, I’m a Twitter geek, and Twidroid is defintely the most full features twitter client i know of, it lacks the streamlined integration of Peep, the HTC client but’s very configurable and looks sharp

Newsrob – Google Reader Client

Simple idea, scheduled retrieval of RSS/Podcast and Blog updates from my Google Reader account

Truphone & SIPDroid – VOIP Clients

(http://www.truphone.com)

You may remember Truphone from my N95 articles from a while back and I still use it too for cheap world wide phone calls, and free voip -> voip or skype calls all from within the program.  I’ve been testing SIPDroid as well with my VOIP carrier sipgate.co.uk.  The only problem I’ve got now is choosing which number to give to people as my primary number, I’ve no doubt within a very short time period VOIP accounts like this will be the norm on all data plans.

XBMC Remote Android (android-xbmcremote)

(http://code.google.com/p/android-xbmcremote/)

I’d only recently started using XBMC remote on an old laptop and it has revolutionised the way I watch media on TV, but one thing that annoyed me was needing a wireless keyboard/mouse to interact with it (or even worse, getting up and going to the TV to change media), until I found XBMC remote, like a virtual remote that works via HTTP over WIFI.  It can access almost every function within XBMC including whats playing, media list, info, etc and will even do WOL (Wake on LAN) to start the computer up after its been switched off.  I’ll never have to get off the couch again!!!

Others

• Transdroid – For access to a transmission-daemon for torrent monitoring, I use it for a number of torrent clients now, very useful! (http://www.transdroid.org/)
• chompSMS – Not essential, but who wouldn’t want the IPhone’s message screen, an almost exact copy from what I can see (http://www.chompsms.com)
• Better Keyboard and/or Shapewriter/Swype – Keyboard replacements that definitely make typing faster on the device (in fact, I’m typing this blog post with it right now!… .Not, but you get the idea)
• SetCPU – for over/underclocking to increase performance or increase battery life (one of life’s true dilemmas)

I’ve been using linux in some form or another for well over ten years now, and I’ve (at least in my mind) been past the n00b stage for the better part of that time period. Of course, in my case, it doesn’t matter if I was an occasional user or the Grand Pu-bar of Gentoo-vian I’d still make mistakes, and this week I embarrassed myself terribly.

My beloved home NAS (QNAP TS-409 Pro that I wrote over a year ago) has been customised in many different ways and although underpowered when compared to the rest of the computers in the house has taken over responsibility of many things that my laptop(s) previously did, such as:

• Headless Transmission (Bittorrent) client
  • Auto downloading based keyword searches from RSS feeds
  • Scheduled speed changes (off during business hours, 1/3 speed during the evenings, then full speed at other times)
  • Daemon controllable web client (clutch), Android app (Transdroid) or one of the many transmission remote clients for Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Automatic seed ratio checking to stop seeded downloads at a certain point and unpack/move the downloads their area (Music/TV/Movies — all legal of course)
• Automatic remote backup
  • Rsync backups from the hd911.com server
  • SVN mirror for remote development SVN server, and a primary personal SVN server which is replicated elsewhere
• UPnP server for my XBMC PC, pushing all available media content, photo collection to any UPnP client
• Subsonic Media Server –  mainly so I can stream my music collection to my phone, or when I’m out or at work
• and all the other features that come with the device as standard

Needless to say, I use it for everything, and now I can’t due to a momentously stupid change to /etc/passwd, where I altered the root account (the only one accessible remotely) login shell from /bin/sh to /bin/bash, which ashamedly isn’t accessible until after logging in (some magic in .bashrc) to link the bash from the optware/NSLU2 installation in /opt/bin back to it’s normal place /bin. Now unfortunately, I can’t login at all (except via the web client), but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to change the value in /etc/passwd so I can fix it.

Links to an article that seems somewhat relevant

The things I’ve tried so far are:

• Basic telnet/SSH login attempts, running a command as part of the SSH statement (i.e ssh admin@qnap.****.local cat /etc/passwd)
• Issue chsh to attempt a login shell change (ssh admin@qnap.****.local chsh /bin/sh)
• Writing a dodgy web script (total failure)
• Writing one of the QNAP installable packages (a QPKG) which appear to have elevated system privileges during install (can’t find enough information)
• I can’t take the drive(s) out to replace the file easily as its 4x drives in RAID-5 and I don’t have a PC to load them into
• I also can’t wipe the device as it (to my knowledge) deletes all data off the drives in the process.

The way I see it, I’ve now got two choices, either to buy a large HDD and move all the shared stuff off before wiping the device and starting again although this is not perfect as I’ll lose all the scripts and configuration that aren’t accessible via network share.  My other option is finding someone with a PC and 4x SATA ports and attempting to re-mount the array, this is probably the best/most reliable the way, but I believe it or not don’t know any one with such a machine, and we’ve all got Macbooks at the office.

Any ideas, anyone?

• speed/storage improvements with kernel optimisations, swap/compcache and supports running apps from the SD Card on a range of filesystems (ext2/3/4, BFS, etc)
• new pre-release updates showing off new Android and HTC SenseUI features
• security software (Droidwall & Wavesecure) for protecting the phone from network attack, and locking it down/wiping it if stolen
• software packs and updates from other phones (Motorola, etc)

The principle resource at the moment for the development of ROM’s is the Hero android development forum at XDA-Developers, ROM’s so far:

MoDaCo’s Custom ROM (www.modaco.com)

Download/Info Link:

[ROM] 02/12 3.0 – MoDaCo Custom ROM Core / Chinese with TCK featuring Wavesecure

Paul from Modaco first released his ROM in August with releases every few days/weeks ever since.  It was a breath of fresh air after the initial software release that shipped with the phone (1.76.xx), and after v1.5 most of the speed, lag issues on the phone were all but gone.

Android Version: Cupcake (1.5)

Versions: 1.0 -> 3.0 (2/12/2009)

Features:

• HTC/Sense UI based
• Optimised build from official HTC updates
• Newer versions include Tecknologist’s Custom Kernel (TCK) 1.9
• Rooted (of course)
• Includes wifi-tether, busybox, Spare Parts, Wavesecure etc

Drizzy’s MotoBlur

Download/Info Link:

[ROM][PORT] Drizzys MotoBlur v1.0rc2 for Hero [STOPPED NO MORE DEV]

Now discontinued ROM showcasing the Universal contacts feature from Motorola’s BLUR UI.

Versions: 1.0 (September 2009) – [DEPRECATED]

Android Version: Cupcake (1.5)

behnaam’s Donut Clean ROM

Download/Info Link:

[ROM] Clean ION 1.6 for our Hero v1.0 [30/10/09]

This ROM was an attempt at a clean (no Rosie/Sense UI) build of Donut (Android 1.6) for the hero, but since the release of the Kernel source code and pre-release Android 2.0 leaks all development has virtually stopped.

Android Version: Donut (1.6)

Versions: beta

Features:

• Clean Donut build free of HTC’s SenseUI

Lox_Dev’s AOSP 2.0 Android release

Download/Info Link: XDA-Developers [DEV] AOSP-Eclair-2.0 (version beta1) – 29-11-2009

First Android 2.0 build for the Hero

Android Version: Eclair (2.0)

Versions: Beta1 (30/10/2009)

Features:

• Clean (AOSP) Android open source project build, with no Google Apps or HTC SenseUI

Behnaam’s Hero v2.1

Download/Info Link:

[ROM] Hero 2.1 v1.3 – It’s here by Behnaam w/ base from KingKlick [3/12/09]

Bleeding edge HTC SesnseUI based ROM with Android 2.1 and all the new 2.0 features, involves work from barakinflorida, eugene, kingklick, drizzy and a few others.

Android Version: Eclair-bugfixes (2.1)

Versions: 1.1 -> 1.3 (3/12/2009)

Features:

• HTC/Sense UI based

The HTC Hero with Sense UI

In hindsight this was without doubt the best decision  due to a few reasons:

• it’s the first Droid with custom UI (SenseUI), and while slow/buggy at first has moved in leaps and bounds since (now other manufacturers have their own UI
• the developer community supporting HTC Android devices helps with update and optimisations
• hype around the Hero and its release (as well as an ‘award’) have made it very popular boosting community support
• right from the start there’s been a few dedicated devs who’ve been releasing custom made and highly optimised ROM’s/kernels based on pre-released HTC and Google builds
• did I mention SenseUI yet?

In contrast, the Galaxy has a large OLED screen with fantastically vibrant colour output and clarity, but there’s just no dev community and the hype has all but died since its initial release.

The Samsung Galaxy i7500 with stock Android UI

Stating the obvious, but one of the things that makes Android a great platform and sets it apart from the iPhones, Symbians and Blackberrys of the world is its open nature and customisability which doesn’t help when there’s no developer community to hack away at kernel compilation, optimise builds and boot process, make customised themes or cross breed apps/software accross other Android devices.

With Motorola Milestone, Sony Experia X10 and a multitude of models from Acer, Dell, HP (some big names in the computing industry there!) as well as a whole list of upcoming HTC Droids, the next few years is looking exciting.

Stay tuned for a series of posts about the Hero, and its hackery.