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Root A few minor questions about xtrROM 4.0.4 beta

hdevine

Member
Nov 28, 2009
76
6
I just installed this ROM last night and will be giving it a go over the next few days. Seems really good so far, but I have a few questions.

1) I did a full wipe of the phone, including the Dalvik cache, then flashed the ROM, wiped and partitioned the SD card, then ran the app2sd.sh script out of GScript (according to the post here: [ROM-beta] [8/14/2010] xtrROM4.x [apps2sd,jit,lwp,nav,oc]-Vanilla that embraces HTC - xda-developers). I can look at my SD card & Phone storage menu and see that the space on the card is less than it was, but how can I really be sure that my installed apps are going onto the SD card?

2) What is the home screen that is installed on this ROM? Is it the basic HTC home screen? I only have 3 screens and I read about others saying that LauncherPro or ADW works really well. Would it be worth downloading one of those? What about GDE? I had that installed when I was on stock 2.1 and, while it was cool, it was very laggy. Anyone have any experiences on GDE on root?

Thanks,
Harry
 
1) I think that the only way to be SURE would be to turn off your phone, remove the SD card, reboot the phone and see what apps no longer work (because they are on the SD card).
You could also check menu > settings > sd card and phone storage. At the bottom there is 'Available Space', which should be showing more space available than the phone has internal storage. That's a pretty good clue that the apps willl be going to your SD card, but you wouldn't know for SURE. :)


2) I believe that's the stock Home. As for which home to use, you've just jumped into the realm of personal preference. I prefer LauncherPro, but that's just me.
 
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Just to add to mhotovec's comments, if you got ot phone storage, pretty much anything over 100MB means a2sd is working. If it's not working, installing a few apps will knock your available space down really fast. Usually, off a fresh install before you add apps, you should expect to see something in the area of 150 MB

And like mhotovec, I like Launcher Pro much better and I actually find that it runs faster on my my phone.. but like everything else ymmv
 
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Thanks for the insight! I'm going to give LauncherPro a try. I did remember 2 other questions that I had and left out of my initial email.

1) Can anyone recommend a good battery widget? I liked the HTC sense one, but since I'm not using Sense now, I don't have it.

2) When I lock the screen, I see the time on the slider that I slide down to unlock. I read a post on here where some ROMs can customize that screen/area. Does that apply to this ROM?

Thanks again for all of the help!
Harry
 
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hdevine

for the battery widget, try battery left. It's very customizable and gives you lots of options like time remaining until empty and temp. It should be in the market but if not try using appbrain to find it.

as for the lock screen, in the original post of xtrROM on xda, there is a zip for a nexus lock screen that should work. It did work for version 3.0.3.
 
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I just installed a few more apps and looked at "SD Card and Phone Storage". I don't remember the exact sizes that I had earlier, but from what I can gather and remember, it looks like the apps are being installed on the internal phone memory and not the SD card. How can I either move them over to the card? Do I just run that apps2sd.sh script out of GScript?

Thanks,
Harry
 
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I wanted to report that, in fact, I do NOT think that the apps are being installed on the SD card. Yesterday I reported that I had 96 meg available internal, 4.38 gig on the SD card. Well, I put a few more apps on (ADW Launcher and a few other apps & themes) last night, and when I look at the storage numbers, I currently have 86.11 meg left on internal and the SD card is still 4.38 gig. So, it appears like new apps aren't being installed on the SD card after all.

Any ideas?
Harry
 
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To chime in with Harry, I too am having the same issue I believe. I am on xtrSense 4.0.5, but it seems the steps are all the same; gscript the .sh file per the xtrSense's instruction on the XDA post, reboot and you should be good to go. I did the same test, i.e. re-install apps and continue to check the internal storage. It has incrementally gone down consistent with the size of the app installed. It appears a2sd is not working.

As with Harry, any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
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I wanted to report that, in fact, I do NOT think that the apps are being installed on the SD card. Yesterday I reported that I had 96 meg available internal, 4.38 gig on the SD card. Well, I put a few more apps on (ADW Launcher and a few other apps & themes) last night, and when I look at the storage numbers, I currently have 86.11 meg left on internal and the SD card is still 4.38 gig. So, it appears like new apps aren't being installed on the SD card after all.


First of all, when the apps are installed on SD, they are not installed into the same place that is reporting the amount of free space on your SD card - they are being installed into a separate partition on the SD card.

If you followed the instructions fully for a2sd, you:

- backed up your SD card
- went into Amon's recovery and partitioned the card, creating an ext2 partition that was bigger than 0, and (optionally) a swap partition of more than 0.
- in Amon's recovery, converted the ext2 partition to ext3
- restarted xtr, ran the gscript that turns on a2sd, and restarted the phone.

Of course, at some point you would copy your backed-up files from the SD card back.

The loss of 12 mb of room in internal memory, I believe, is due to Dalvik cache (it could also be cache and data space for the built-in system apps that continue to reside in internal memory.) There is also a gscript to move Dalvik cache to SD, if I am not mistaken.

Also, see my post here: http://androidforums.com/all-things-root-eris/152542-xtrrom-4-0-6-a.html#post1405633 for more on the instructions that the developer provides to confirm a2sd is active.
 
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First of all, when the apps are installed on SD, they are not installed into the same place that is reporting the amount of free space on your SD card - they are being installed into a separate partition on the SD card.
.

Yep, this.
If it helps any, think of one physical hard drive in Windows being partitioned into a C drive and a D drive. You only have one physical drive, but it operates as two different logical spaces. The same thing is happening here with your SD card.
 
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