Since I’ve got 3 Android phones, I might as well root them right? I’ve been happily running Bugless Beast 0.4 on my Verizon Droid for several months now and it is faster than my Nexus One running CM6 by a long shot. This rom is awesome, so I wanted to install BB0.5 when it was released.

Well, it wasn’t as easy as I had planned. Using Rom Manager, I used the clockwork recovery to try to install it. No dice. Some weird “Can’t Mount /dev/block/mmcblk0″ error. Same thing with CM6. What gives?

I tried this a month back, but I only got it working now. Maybe it was an update in Rom Manager that fixed it or something. I read removing the SD card to make sure it is in place might help. BB0.4 could mount it, so I knew the card was fine. It was something with the recovery. I came across this before and tried Doctor’s suggestion: http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/2315-cant-mount-devblockmmcblk0p1/ The first time it didn’t work for me, but it did this time around.

The steps to fix this are as follows:

1. Open Rom Manager
2. Menu -> Clear Download Cache
3. Flash Alternate Recovery
4. Reboot phone
5. Open Rom Manager again
6. Install your new rom (and Wipe Data and Cache)

Cross your fingers and hopefully it should work for you. I’m happily running Bugless Beast 0.5 now.

Today I decided to finally get around to rooting my Motorola Droid that I received for going to the Google I/O conference. After going back to the 2.0.1 firmware using RSD Lite, I realized that I had to reactivate my phone. I’m out of service range so the phone call couldn’t be completed, and I no longer have my trial month of service even if it did work. Luckily there is an easy way to bypass activation and still use your phone as an internet tablet.

Simply touch each corner of the screen (I used inside the black area where the android logo was) starting with the top left and moving clockwise around it. You’ll jump right into the home screen and be ready to go! Hope that helps!

This worked for only certain versions on my Motorola Droid. Every time on boot I am presented with the activation screen still, however I can bypass it by simply pressing Home (now that I am running Bugless Beast v0.4). I’ve also had the experience where I couldn’t bypass it with these methods, doing the activation call a couple of times, failing, and then pressing home let me through. Who knows what might work for you, but eventually you can get through.

“Android requires .class compatibility set to 5.0. Please fix project properties.” What’s this? It’s the error I received after cloning a repository and trying to import it into Eclipse. There is reasonably little information online about this, couple discussions on mailing lists but I figured I would write a post on the solution to this.

After importing the project to your workspace, you’ve received the error. So what you need to do next is to right click on the project -> Android Tools -> Fix Project Properties. Now this alone won’t fix the problem, you need to restart Eclipse after this. After that try building the project again and it should work successfully this time (unless you have bugs in the code itself, I did).

Hope that helps people. This my first time tinkering with someone else’s Android codebase. I’m excited!

It also might help if I mention that some things, the Android Launcher, require the full android code base in order to compile properly.

So today I got the chance finally to play around with installing PhoneGap. Should be easy right? Not quite. The tools for Java on Windows really don’t have a good configuration when you install them and you end up messing with environment variables and things until it just happens to work. So let me go through a little bit of what I did in order to get it setup.

I started out by using this tutorial. Everything seems to work reasonably well however a few things were left out. Essentially you want to extract the SDK and ANT to C: so that you have C:android-sdk-windows and C:apache-ant-1.8.1 (just the version I was using, you should modify it to match yours). There is no default install location for these so its best to put them in the root of C for easy access or in the Program Files directory. Your choice, just remember where you put them. You need to add these to your PATH environment variable like they mention by going to My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables which might differ depending on your Windows installation. Now my JDK didn’t setup the JAVA_HOME directory so I didn’t have a clue what was really happening when it failed to build. Essentially the PhoneGap jar fails to build which then fails to create your droidgap project when you are trying to create a new project. This is poor design on the script since it should quit when it doesn’t find the file but oh well that’s another story. So what I needed to do was to create a new Environment Variable named JAVA_HOME and set it to “C:Program Files (x86)Javajdk1.6.0_20″ Saving this an opening up a fresh command line should let you smoothly go through and build the jar which then creates the project properly using droidgap.

The next problem I ran into was the default.properties file in the framework folder was set to using android-8 which was an unavailable target on my machine. Like the tutorial mentioned, I changed it to android-7 and everything seemed to work alright afterwards.

Hopefully those fixes help. It is always a mess working with libraries strewn all over the place especially when they expect environment variables to be created. Why we can’t develop proper installers for these libraries is beyond me…