Hello, everyone. As I said in the title, I have a bunch of questions that relate one way or another to the whole process of updating to JellyBean.

1.
A few months ago, I followed this tutorial to the letter to format my external SD card. I made my larger partition FAT32 and my smaller partition ext2, because I was using stock ICS. I can't remember which thread it was anymore, but somewhere in these forums someone said that for JB, the SD card should be ext3. How important is this? If it's no big deal, then good: It's one less thing to worry about. But if it matters, what's the proper order of operations here? I imagine pulling the card before I update, re-formating it, and then putting it back after I update would be the most prudent thing to do.

1a.
I assume that after all is said and done, I'll be able to re-root one way or another and once again be able to use Link2SD? (I really, really hope that this will fix my problem with the external SD card spontaneously un-mounting!)

2.
Given the issues people are reporting with the JB update, what's the better way to go about this: Do I do the OTA update? Do I use Kies and hope it's got JB in the pipeline? Do I flash a JB ROM someone posted here?

3.
Given the issues people are reporting with the JB update, would it be feasible to give Cyanogen Mod a whirl? Is it compatible with VM's SGR?

4.
In the event I end up starting from scratch, how much will I hate Google Hangouts?

Thank you!

 

How would you compare Hangouts to Talk? Is it anything like the GMail app update, which I'm not very fond of? (Dangit, Google, it wasn't broken! Why did you try to "fix" it?)

Thanks.

 

I use Talk for chat/texting. (I have a low-minutes plan, so I've asked my co-workers to text me instead of calling me if they need to tell me anything.) The screenshots of Hangouts on the Google Play Store page make it look a lot more cluttered than Talk is. And considering that the SGR is kind of slender, well...

Thanks.

 

I found /system/app/Talk.apk and uploaded it to my Dropbox -- does this mean I can have my gTalk back if I find myself wiping clean and starting fresh?

(yay...?)

Thanks.

 

Cool. Because I also un-did the GMail update and backed up that apk, too. :dalek:

Interesting how the Talk.apk from xda is 1.2 MB while the Talk.apk I backed up from my /system/app/ directory is 2.1 MB.

Thanks.

 

I tried going the Kies route, but it hangs after it finishes downloading the firmware components. Fortunately, my phone seems completely oblivious to this miserably failed attempt. Looks like I'll be doing the OTA followed by a factory reset as soon as I can get to a place with wi-fi.

Thanks.

 

Everything I care about is backed up, and with luck I didn't forget anything. Thanks to sanjuro77, I have an installable .apk of gTalk. My backed up older version of the gMail .apk may or may not work, but I can live with it if it doesn't.

I'm as ready as I'll ever be for the factory reset. From there will be re-rooting and greenifying ... or should that be greenifying, then re-rooting? Or does it matter?

Fingers crossed, breath held!

Thanks.

ETA: OMG so full of win! JB came with the older versions of gTalk and gMail, and with auto-update turned off, I'm good to go with respect to this! (yay...!)