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A separate page tells how to install CyanogenMod.
These notes are very specific to jimc's preferences and configuration, but other readers can get an idea of the procedure which I've found to be efficient.
After you flash CyanogenMod and do the initial boot, it will drop into the Setup Wizard. You can skip all of the items and take care of them later, but it's nicer to do it immediately.
Setup wizard wants you to pick your language. For the US SKU, en_US is preset. Just hit Next.
The next steps need Internet access, which on the tablet means WiFi. Have ready the SSID and password of your WiFi network and configure it when given the opportunity. (A cellphone could do this over cellular data.)
Give your loginID@gmail.com and the password for your Google account. You could also create a Google account at this point, though jimc recommends pre-creating it using another computer. Setup in CyanogenMod also lets you bypass this step entirely, although you need the Google account to use the Market app.
To set up your Google account later, launch Settings, scroll way down to Accounts, hit +Add Account, pick Google, give loginid@gmail.com and your password.
It has to do stuff on the cloud server. Give it time.
On the next screen you're offered the opportunity to join Google+. Not a chance. Hit Next.
Do you want to back up your stuff in the cloud? Consider your security policies carefully here. Jimc insists on backing up to my own cloud server, but many other people think nothing of storing their personal files on a service with no service level agreement, whose business model is world domination through advertising. The prudent user will un-check both boxes and hit Next.
Google Location Service. While a lot of people are paranoid about revealing their point of physical presence, I am a little looser in this category than for the backups, and left both location boxes checked. These are to make your location available to apps, and to include your location in Google search queries. Hit Next.
Setup is complete. Hit Finish. (In CyanogenMod-9 they asked for your full name, but not in version 10.1.)
Next step is to set a few settings to make the UI a little less annoying while you restore your apps and data. Hit Menu - Settings and pick:
Display
Brightness: turn on automatic; in CM-10.1 it's off by default. In CM-9 there was a page for tweaking the automatic algorithm but I don't see it here.
Sleep, set to 5 minutes.
System (the toplevel section, not the one in Interface):
Date & Time
Developer options: These are hidden. I'm not sure who enforces this,
Android-4.2.x Super Jelly Bean
in general, or specifically
CyanogenMod-10.1. However:
This wiki article tells
how to
turn on Developer Options: In Settings - About Tablet
(or About Phone), find the build number, and tap it seven times. You
will be notified that You are now a developer
, and the Developer
Options and Performance sections will be visible in the System section.
The whole developer page has an on-off switch in the title row; turn on.
Advanced Reboot (reboot into Recovery etc.): turn on.
Root Access: change to Apps and ADB (default is Apps only).
Android Debugging: turn on.
Normally I would restore apps and data at this point, but to keep the documentation more organized I'm listing the non-basic settings first:
Now that the apps are restored it's time to set the rest of the settings.
The current version of CM9 has fewer settings than CM7 (Gingerbread) had,
and likely some of those will be brought forward in future versions.
I've tagged these CM7
in these notes. Also, I'm listing only settings
that I changed, with only a few exceptions.
Wireless and Network:
WiFi: On; and configured various access points. Note: if you have WiFi on and are not in range of a connectable access point, the OS will do repeated wireless scans, which eats battery: almost half of capacity in 8 hours. Use your widget (see below) to turn it off.
VPN: Need to test this, but later. See below for procedure.
Interface Section:
Launcher (Trebuchet)
Homescreen
Homescreens (number of panels): default is 5, I changed to 3. Default homescreen, change from 3 to 2.
Search Bar: Turned off. This is the Google Search widget which is annoyingly ubiquitous.
General: Auto Screen Rotation, turned on. There was also a control for this in Display.
Lock Screen
Screen Security (duplicated in Personal - Security section)
Lock style: Pattern
Automatically Lock: 10 minutes after sleeping (default is 5 seconds).
Owner info: Jim Carter's Mica -- jimc@jfcarter.net
Themes: There is only one provided.
Personalization:
Lockscreen Options (in Screen Security):
Screen Lock (style): Secured with pattern. A non-null lock style is required to use the X.509 certificate storage.
Automatically Lock (how long after the screen is turned off for inactivity, to require the password etc.). Default is immediate, changed to 10 min.
Power button instantly locks: Default is on; formerly I turned this off but this time I left it on.
Screen Timeout Delay (how long after the screen is turned
off for inactivity, to require the password etc.). Default
is immediate, changed to 10 min. This looks like the
same contingency as for Automatically Lock
.
Screen Turned Off Delay (how long after the screen is voluntarily turned off to require the password). Default is 5 sec, changed to 10 min.
Status Bar: This is the single row of text at the top of the screen.
Battery Status Style: I set percentage. In CM-7 you get just a number. In CM-10 the number is in a circle forming kind of a pie chart showing the same information graphically. In CM-11 you can turn on the circle (I did).
Notification Drawer: Flick down in the status bar at the left or center (configurable), and it will list your notifications. I left these all at their defaults.
Quick Settings Panel: Flick down in the status bar at the right side, and you get an array of icons. Click on one and it will be turned on/off. Long-press, and you (usually) get a direct jump to the settings page for that feature, e.g. Wi-Fi. I picked these icons. In several cases a gray icon means the feature is off, a white icon means it is on but unused, and a colored icon (e.g. Bluetooth) means it is active. These are the icons I've turned on, in order (on Selen):
Quick Access Ribbon: If you turn this on, when you open the Notification Drawer a row of smaller icons will appear at the top, chosen from the same set as for the Quick Settings Panel, but there is space for fewer icons.
Device Section:
Sound Settings:
Quiet Hours: Enable, 00:00 to 08:00, mute notifications, haptic feedback and vibration. Notification light was left on.
Notification Ringtone: Missed It
. Several others are
pretty good also.
There's a duplicate setting for the phone ringtone:
Pyxis
. Loud and annoying, sounds like an antique phone.
Default Notification Sound: default is Orion
which
is so-so; I'm trying CyanDoink
but may change back
to Missed It
.
Display: Some of these were set up in the first step.
Brightness: Set to Automatic.
Wallpaper: See below for a more extensive discussion of
wallpaper. I downloaded Spider
by markoo from the Market.
This was quickly rejected due to negative WAF (Wife Acceptance
Factor).
Rotation: Enabled all 4 orientations; default is 0, 90, 270 but not 180.
Sleep: change to 5 minutes, default is 1 minute.
Advanced Settings -- Dock -- Keyboard wakes device (turn on).
Personal Section:
Security
Owner Info: This is displayed on the lock screen.
I configured Mica (jimc@jfcarter.net)
.
Unknown Sources (turn on): allows installing packages from other than the Market. There's a lurid warning; blow it off.
Install (X.509 certificates) from the SD card. I need my home and work root certificates, and my personal certificates at home and at work. All (?) TLS connections check the partner's host certificate against this keystore, and if the browser is asked for a user certificate it will come from here.
Language and Input
Physical Keyboard - Auto Replace and Auto Punctuate: turn off (they are on by default).
Accounts and Sync
Gmail and Whatsapp will add themselves automatically.
Use the Add Account
button at the bottom to
add the CalDAV and CardDAV accounts. It will want the server's
URL, your loginID, and password. To set the URL,
use manual mode and imitate their example for SOGo,
substituting your loginID where it says user
, and give
the port where the SOGo server or its Apache proxy is actually
listening, which in my case is 443, not the one they gave,
Gmail: All sync categories are turned off. I use Gmail as little as possible.
CFT Address Book: Edit account settings, and turn on sync.
Jimc's Calendar: almost identical to CFT Address Book.
System Settings
Developer Options: See the preliminary setup steps for how to activate this page. Some of these were set at that point.
Advanced Reboot (reboot into Recovery etc.): turn on.
Root Access: Apps and ADB (default is Apps only).
Android Debugging: turn on.
Device Hostname: Default is something random; set to
mica
.
I could turn on Kill App Back Button
but I didn't.
With this enabled, if you long-press the back button it will
kill the foreground app.
I left all the Performance settings at the defaults. Specifically, the CPU governor can adjust the speed from 204MHz to 1700MHz as needed.
Anonymous statistics: In CM-10 it's in About Tablet. It's on by default and I left it on.
Find Wallpaper in the Device-Display section; you can also get to this menu by long pressing in the home screen background, or it's on the Menu key's menu (if one has a Menu key). For CM7 I picked Cyanogen wallpapers #2, the skating droid on colored shale. In CM-10 I kept the default, called Phase Beam from Live Wallpapers.
Here are a few of the wallpapers available in CM-10.1:
I think the included wallpapers are mostly the same as
in CM-10. This time I'm trying out the Spider. My wife refuses to have
an arachnid crawling around like that.
WAF is important.
Reverting to CyanogenMod wallpaper Not Quite Mono
.
Here's the procedure (for CM7) to use an externally generated picture, specifically android-2.1/packages/apps/Launcher/res/drawable-hdpi/wallpaper_ sunset.jpg (or any version that I have from 1.5 to 2.3):
At least for the 480x320 screen (MDPI) of the HTC Dream (G1), the photo should be 640x480px in size. JPEG is acceptable; I don't know which other formats it can handle. If the size or aspect ratio is wrong, the Gallery app will let you crop or scale it.
Copy it to the SD card's VFAT partition, possibly in any subdirectory.
Hit the Menu key; Wallpapers; it asks complete
action using file manager or Gallery
. I tried the
file manager, but after I selected the item, the
response was not recognized and the dialog box popped
up again. Trying Gallery:
Give it a moment to search for displayable photos. Find the one you want. Tap it.
The gallery app will show a larger image with a crop rectangle. Drag the edges to cover the entire photo, unless you actually want to show only part of it. Hit Save.
It will scale the cropped image and save it to some hidden place, and use it as the desktop wallpaper.
The controls for the desktop (home screen, window manager,
Trebuchet
) used to be mixed with the general settings, but in
CyanogenMod-11.x you get to them by long-pressing in the desktop background
(or the menu key if you have one). It shows you an icon of a house, at the
top; press this to make the current page the default one. At the bottom are
icons for setting wallpaper, widgets and themes. In the center is a cluster
of 3 small dots. Click on the dots to open the settings menu. The default
scroll effects are actually decent, and None
is not really none;
you can leave it on None. My major change was to disable the ubiquitous
and annoying Google search bar. Click the dots again to close this menu.
On the phone (Selen) I use a 4x4 array of icons. On the tablet (Mica)
I use 5x8. The default spacing of Comfortable
works out; Crammed
puts them too close together.
To create a new page, put an app icon or widget on the rightmost existing page and drag it off the right margin. This also works directly from the app drawer. To make a page disappear, including interior pages, remove (or relocate) all icons on it.
I'm trying to use a similar layout on both Mica and Selen.
The bottom row of special icons are phone (vacant on Mica), app drawer,
and Firefox.
I've set 3 pages of icons. On MIca they are in the upper right 4x4
region and a photo or widget (3x3 or 3x4) goes on the vacant left side.
I'm using the Simple Photo Widget
. The provided Photo Widget
(part of Gallery) is fine except that you have to crop the picture and
let it store the cropped version, and when you go to change to a different
photo, I can't get Gallery to finish, i.e. you pick the photo and then
what?
Page 0 (Left): Photo of otter snoozing.
| |||
| -- | -- | Thermostat | H.E. Net Tools |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| Air Control | Mahjongg | -- | -- |
| Andoku | Lexic | Solitaire | (DSP) |
Page 1 (Center): Photo of standing otter
| |||
| -- | Tasks | -- | Phone Tester |
| ClockSync | Camera | Gallery | Barcode Scanner |
| Kitchen Timer | Amazon Kindle | -- | Apollo |
| Night Clock | Jota+ Text Edit | Maps by Google | -- |
Page 2 (Right): Clock/Weather (3x3)
| |||
| StrongSwan | OpenVPN Set | Wifi Analyzer | GPS Status |
| -- | Xabber | Google Sch | Play Store |
| VX ConnectBot | Dropbear SSH | aCalendar | People |
| ES File Mgr | WPS Office | RealCalc | CadreBible |
| Selection | Setup | Testing | Software | Homedir | Top |