How to install upto 5 OS on your Android Phone

How to install upto 5 OS on your Android Phone !

Those of you Android users who are looking to add a little more to your existing handset, in terms of ROMs, here’s how you can go about booting up your handset with upto five different Android operating system versions on a single phone. All you need is a simple utility app, called Boot Manager, a fairly large SD card (at least 8 GB or higher) and your favorite ROMs.

Boot Manager is a unique and powerful utility app from ‘www.init2winitapps.com’ and costs just Rs 146 on the Android Marketplace. The app is a multi-boot application, which allows you to boot up to five different ROMs on a single Android smartphone. The first ROM is installed on the phone’s internal storage itself, while the other four ROMs are installed on the SD card in the form of image files, which are mounted and ready for use when required.

Each image file (boot, system, data and SDEXT) is created according to the existing phone’s partition table and ROM needs; but they can be tweaked to increase or decrease the space for each ROM’s requirement. Switching between the ROMs is as simple as selecting the desired ROM and rebooting the device.

These ROMs (apart from the phones ROM) run directly from the SD card without disturbing or affecting the original ROM on your phone’s internal storage. Those who like to test and try different ROMs from third-party developers can benefit from this app. App developers can also benefit those testing their apps on different Android OS versions using a single phone.

If you’re game, let us show you how to configure and run this app. But before we start, here are a few important things you need to know.

You will need a rooted handset with a recovery (CWM or 4EXT recovery) utility already installed.

Your phone should have the security flag set to OFF (S-OFF).

An updated Superuser app with logging disabled.

An SD card with no bad sectors.

A fully charged phone. Connecting the charger is best suited.

Those unfamiliar with some above words can refer to the XDA forums on how to root, S-OFF and install a custom recovery utility on the phone.

Here is a list of compatible Android handsets on which this application will run successfully. Those who have handsets, which are not listed here can try them at their own risk. To get more information about handset support and software related issues you can log on to the developer’s website at ‘www.init2winitapps.com’.

Compatible handsets:

HTC: Desire, Desire HD, Desire S, EVO 4G/3D, Incresible1/2/S, Inspire 4G, Sensation, Thunderbolt, Vision.

Motorola: Droid 1/2/X, MyTouch 4G

Nexus One and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Note: Little knowledge about how to root and tweak your android handset can end up with a permanently damaged phone and also void the warranty. We are not responsible for any bricked handsets, while performing this workshop. Do this at your own risk.

If you haven't rooted your phone, yet, this workshop should help you get a better idea of how to do it and how to install a custom recovery firmware.

Let’s begin

Download and install the BootManager app from the Android Marketplace and run the app. You should be greeted with a few welcome screens. Proceed with the instructions on the screen and you shall be informed to initially setup your phone’s original ROM, before installing any other using BootManager. This is a crucial step as your phone’s original ROM’s boot.img file needs to be saved, in order to boot into the original ROM, whenever you need it.

Once done, the app will inform you about the success of saving the boot image of your phone’s original ROM. A warning message will also pop up informing you not to do this step, if you are booted into one of the SD card’s ROM. This step needs to be performed only once at the initial stage and will take just a few seconds. If you bypassed this screen accidentally, you can do it after Boot Manager starts up. It is recommended that you take a complete backup (nandroid) of your phone’s existing ROM, using the recovery utility of the phone before proceeding further.

Now that you are in the Boot Manager’s user interface, you will see six screens from left to right named ‘Phone ROM’, ‘ROM 1’, ROM 2’, ‘ROM 3’, ‘ROM 4’ and ‘Settings’, respectively. Begin with the Phone ROM first. Click on the button ‘Manage UI’. This step is optional, as it is just an information screen setup for the phone’s ROM. Here you can enter the details about the ROM, such as ROM name, Kernel name, description about the ROM and a screenshot for visual identification of the ROM.

Installing the First ROM

Make sure you have downloaded the ROMS from the Internet and stored them in an appropriate location on the SD card before you proceed. Now switch to the ROM 1 screen and you’ll find four buttons - Boot ROM, Install ZIP, Manage Slot and Manage UI. Tap the ‘Install ZIP’ button.

Clicking the Install ZIP button will bring up three more options - ‘Install Kernel’, which allows you to upgrade or replace the kernel of the ROM installed on this slot and ‘Restore Nandroid’ where you can restore a backup of a ROM that you might have stored previously. Click on ‘Install ZIP’ and select the zip file you wish to install. You‘ll be asked if you want to wipe the system, cache and data partitions before installing. Select all three and a confirmation window will ask for permissions to proceed, which will be followed by another confirmation for the file system required for that specific ROM that you are going to install.

This would either be an EXT2 or an EXT4 file system. Choose the file system as EXT4, if your ROM supports it or else EXT2 should be good enough. The Boot Manager app then starts creating the image files, mounts them and installs the specific ROM into the slot. Keep an eye on the installation (status bar), which should take around 10 minutes. Once it’s complete, you can slick on the notification and proceed to ‘Manage UI’ section of the ROM. When it’s done, click on the ‘Boot ROM’ button and your phone will now boot into the ROM 1 you just installed.

Follow the same procedure for installing other ROMS of your choice in the remaining slots. Boot Manager will also install its app in all the ROM slots, so that you can easily switch back and forth into different ROMs. If you’ve taken a backup of your apps, data and settings using Titanium backup, you can restore your data and apps into other ROMs with ease. But be careful, using Titanium Backup across different ROM types can cause problems. We recommend installing apps and setting up the ROM completely from the start, rather than restoring from Titanium backup, unless you’re well versed with the backup utility.

The Boot Manager utility actually creates a virtual file with the partition table information of the phone and installs the ROM, accordingly. When you switch to a particular ROM, it replaces only the boot image of the phone with the original boot image of the ROM, which then instructs the handset that the partitions are not on the phone’s internal storage, but on the SD card; creating a hard link to the partitions. You can now go ahead and setup the phone as you would do while installing a new ROM.

There might be times where you will witness a failure to boot into the ROM. Don’t panic! If this happens, all you need to do is to replace the boot.img file of the phone to its original place. To do this, remove and re-insert the battery, boot the phone into recovery mode and flash the ‘update.zip’ file located in the folder ‘/sdcard/BootManager/PhoneRom/’. This will replace the original boot.img file to the phone and you shall be back on your phone’s original ROM.

For any further issues and help, you can log on to the init2winit forums and check out the discussions and also post your queries for help.

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By Amrut Deshmukh

Author At TechnoSaber

How to Make Your PC Desktop Look Like Windows Phone 7

How to Make Your PC Desktop Look Like Windows Phone 7 !

Windows Phone 7 offers a unique and exciting UI that displays lots of information efficiently on the screen.  And with a simple Rainmeter theme, you can have the same UI and content directly on your Windows 7 desktop.

Turn your Desktop into a Windows Phone 7 lookalike

To give your Windows 7 desktop a Windows Phone 7 makeover, first you need to have the free Rainmeter application installed.  If you do not have it installed, download it from the link below and run the setup.  Accept the license agreement, and install it with the default settings.

By default Rainmeter will automatically run when you start your computer.  If you do not want this, you can uncheck the box during the setup.

Now, download the Omnimo UI theme for Rainmeter (link below).  You will need to unzip the folder first.

This theme uses the Segoe UI and the Segoe UI Light font, so Windows Vista users need to install the segoeuil.ttf font first, and XP users need to install both the segoeui.ttf and the segoeuil.ttf font first.  Copy the appropriate fonts to C:\Windows\Fonts, or in Vista double-click on the font and select Install.

Now, run the Rainmeter theme setup.  Double-click on the Rainstaller.exe in the Omnimo folder.

Click Express install to add the theme and skin to Rainmeter.

Click Finish, and by default Rainmeter will open with your new theme.

When the new theme opens the first time, you will be asked to read the readme, or simply go to the gallery.

When you open the gallery, you can choose from a wide variety of tiles and gadgets to place on your desktop.  You can also choose a different color scheme for your tiles.

Once you’re done, click the X in the top right hand corner to close the Gallery.  Welcome to your Windows Phone 7 desktop!  Many of the gadgets are dynamic, and you can change the settings for most of them.  The only thing missing is the transition animations that Windows Phone 7 shows when you launch an application.

To make it look even more like Windows Phone 7, you can change your background to black.  This makes the desktop theme really dramatic.

And, if you want to add gadgets or change the color scheme, simply click on the + logo on the top.

Windows Phone 7 Desktop Wallpapers

If you’d prefer to simply change your background, My Microsoft Life has several very nice Windows Phone 7 wallpapers available for free.  Click the link below to download these and other Microsoft-centric wallpapers.

Links

Download Rainmeter

Download the Omnimo UI Rainmeter theme

Download Windows Phone 7 inspired wallpapers

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How to change your IP Address using Command Prompt

How to change your IP Address using Command Prompt 

Most everybody can figure out how to change their IP address using Control Panel, but did you know you can set your network card’s IP address using a simple command from the command prompt?

Note: The following commands require you to have an administrative command prompt open by right-clicking on the icon and choosing Run as Administrator.

Changing Your IP Address

Changing your IP information requires two commands, one for your IP address, subnet mask and default gateway and another for  your DNS settings. In order to change your IP address we use the netsh command, the exact command you want to use is the following:

netsh interface ip set address name=”Local Area Connection” static 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.254

This assumes the following:

The name of the interface you want to change the IP address  for is Local Area Network

You want to statically assign an IP address of 192.168.0.1

You want to set a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0

You want to set a default gateway of 192.168.0.254

Armed with this information you should obviously switch the settings out for some that are suited to your network. You might, however, be wondering how you can go from using an already set static IP address to getting an address from DHCP. In this case the command you are looking for is:

netsh interface ip set address name=”Local Area Connection” source=dhcp

Changing Your DNS Settings

As far as DNS goes you only have two settings to set, a primary DNS server as well as a secondary one. The command to set them is almost identical, to set your primary DNS server you will want to use:

netsh interface ip set dns name=”Local Area Connection” static 192.168.0.250

This again assumes a few things:

The name of the interface you want to change the primary DNS setting for is Local Area Network

The IP address of the DNS Server is 192.168.0.250

To change the IP address of the secondary DNS server you will need to specify the index parameter:

netsh interface ip add dns name=”Local Area Connection” 8.8.8.8 index=2

The above command would set your network adapter named Local Area Connection to use a secondary DNS server address of 8.8.8.8 (which is the Google public DNS servers, incase you didn’t know). The last thing you might want to do it set your DNS settings to be assigned dynamically, which can be done through the following command.

netsh interface ip set dnsservers name=”Local Area Connection” source=dhcp

That’s all the command line magic you are going to need to impress some of your friends, so what are you waiting for?

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Learn UNIX in no time !

Learn UNIX in no time ! 

Directories:

File and directory paths in UNIX use the forward slash "/"

to separate directory names in a path.

examples:

/              "root" directory

/usr           directory usr (sub-directory of / "root" directory)

/usr/STRIM100  STRIM100 is a subdirectory of /usr

Moving around the file system:

pwd               Show the "present working directory", or current directory.

cd                Change current directory to your HOME directory.

cd /usr/STRIM100  Change current directory to /usr/STRIM100.

cd INIT           Change current directory to INIT which is a sub-directory of the current

                        directory.

cd ..             Change current directory to the parent directory of the current directory.

cd $STRMWORK      Change current directory to the directory defined by the environment

                        variable 'STRMWORK'.

cd ~bob           Change the current directory to the user bob's home directory (if you have permission).

Listing directory contents:

ls    list a directory

ls -l    list a directory in long ( detailed ) format

   for example:

$ ls -l

drwxr-xr-x    4 cliff    user        1024 Jun 18 09:40 WAITRON_EARNINGS

-rw-r--r--    1 cliff    user      767392 Jun  6 14:28 scanlib.tar.gz

^ ^  ^  ^     ^   ^       ^           ^      ^    ^      ^

| |  |  |     |   |       |           |      |    |      | 

| |  |  |     | owner   group       size   date  time    name

| |  |  |     number of links to file or directory contents

| |  |  permissions for world

| |  permissions for members of group

| permissions for owner of file: r = read, w = write, x = execute -=no permission

type of file: - = normal file, d=directory, l = symbolic link, and others...

ls -a        List the current directory including hidden files. Hidden files start

             with "."

ls -ld *     List all the file and directory names in the current directory using

             long format. Without the "d" option, ls would list the contents

             of any sub-directory of the current. With the "d" option, ls

             just lists them like regular files.

Changing file permissions and attributes

chmod 755 file       Changes the permissions of file to be rwx for the owner, and rx for

                     the group and the world. (7 = rwx = 111 binary. 5 = r-x = 101 binary)

chgrp user file      Makes file belong to the group user.

chown cliff file     Makes cliff the owner of file.

chown -R cliff dir   Makes cliff the owner of dir and everything in its directory tree.

You must be the owner of the file/directory or be root before you can do any of these things.

Moving, renaming, and copying files:

cp file1 file2          copy a file

mv file1 newname        move or rename a file

mv file1 ~/AAA/         move file1 into sub-directory AAA in your home directory.

rm file1 [file2 ...]    remove or delete a file

rm -r dir1 [dir2...]    recursivly remove a directory and its contents BE CAREFUL!

mkdir dir1 [dir2...]    create directories

mkdir -p dirpath        create the directory dirpath, including all implied directories in the path.

rmdir dir1 [dir2...]    remove an empty directory

Viewing and editing files:

cat filename      Dump a file to the screen in ascii.

more filename     Progressively dump a file to the screen: ENTER = one line down

                  SPACEBAR = page down  q=quit

less filename     Like more, but you can use Page-Up too. Not on all systems.

vi filename       Edit a file using the vi editor. All UNIX systems will have vi in some form.

emacs filename    Edit a file using the emacs editor. Not all systems will have emacs.

head filename     Show the first few lines of a file.

head -n  filename Show the first n lines of a file.

tail filename     Show the last few lines of a file.

tail -n filename  Show the last n lines of a file.

Shells

The behavior of the command line interface will differ slightly depending

on the shell program that is being used.

Depending on the shell used, some extra behaviors can be quite nifty.

You can find out what shell you are using by the command:

    echo $SHELL

Of course you can create a file with a list of shell commands and execute it like

a program to perform a task. This is called a shell script. This is in fact the

primary purpose of most shells, not the interactive command line behavior.

Environment variables

You can teach your shell to remember things for later using environment variables.

For example under the bash shell:

export CASROOT=/usr/local/CAS3.0               Defines the variable CASROOT with the value

                                               /usr/local/CAS3.0.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$CASROOT/Linux/lib      Defines the variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH with

                                               the value of CASROOT with /Linux/lib appended,

                                               or /usr/local/CAS3.0/Linux/lib

By prefixing $ to the variable name, you can evaluate it in any command:

cd $CASROOT         Changes your present working directory to the value of CASROOT

echo $CASROOT       Prints out the value of CASROOT, or /usr/local/CAS3.0

printenv CASROOT    Does the same thing in bash and some other shells.

Interactive History

A feature of bash and tcsh (and sometimes others) you can use

the up-arrow keys to access your previous commands, edit

them, and re-execute them.

Filename Completion

A feature of bash and tcsh (and possibly others) you can use the

TAB key to complete a partially typed filename. For example if you

have a file called constantine-monks-and-willy-wonka.txt in your

directory and want to edit it you can type 'vi const', hit the TAB key,

and the shell will fill in the rest of the name for you (provided the

completion is unique).

Bash is the way cool shell.

Bash will even complete the name of commands and environment variables.

And if there are multiple completions, if you hit TAB twice bash will show

you all the completions. Bash is the default user shell for most Linux systems.

Redirection:

grep string filename > newfile           Redirects the output of the above grep

                                         command to a file 'newfile'.

grep string filename >> existfile        Appends the output of the grep command

                                         to the end of 'existfile'.

The redirection directives, > and >> can be used on the output of most commands

to direct their output to a file.

Pipes:

The pipe symbol "|" is used to direct the output of one command to the input

of another.

For example:

ls -l | more   This commands takes the output of the long format directory list command

               "ls -l" and pipes it through the more command (also known as a filter).

               In this case a very long list of files can be viewed a page at a time.

du -sc * | sort -n | tail 

               The command "du -sc" lists the sizes of all files and directories in the

               current working directory. That is piped through "sort -n" which orders the

               output from smallest to largest size. Finally, that output is piped through "tail"

               which displays only the last few (which just happen to be the largest) results.

Command Substitution

You can use the output of one command as an input to another command in another way

called command substitution. Command substitution is invoked when by enclosing the

substituted command in backwards single quotes. For example:

cat `find . -name aaa.txt`

which will cat ( dump to the screen ) all the files named aaa.txt that exist in the current

directory or in any subdirectory tree.

Searching for strings in files: The grep  command

grep string filename    prints all the lines in a file that contain the string

Searching for files : The find command

find search_path -name filename

find . -name aaa.txt    Finds all the files named aaa.txt in the current directory or

                        any subdirectory tree.

find / -name vimrc      Find all the files named 'vimrc' anywhere on the system.

find /usr/local/games -name "*xpilot*"      

                        Find all files whose names contain the string 'xpilot' which

                        exist within the '/usr/local/games' directory tree.

Reading and writing tapes, backups, and archives: The tar command 

The tar command stands for "tape archive". It is the "standard" way to read

and write archives (collections of files and whole directory trees).

Often you will find archives of stuff with names like stuff.tar, or stuff.tar.gz.  This

is stuff in a tar archive, and stuff in a tar archive which has been compressed using the

gzip compression program respectivly.

Chances are that if someone gives you a tape written on a UNIX system, it will be in tar format,

and you will use tar (and your tape drive) to read it.

Likewise, if you want to write a tape to give to someone else, you should probably use

tar as well.

Tar examples:

tar xv      Extracts (x) files from the default tape drive while listing (v = verbose)

            the file names to the screen.

tar tv      Lists the files from the default tape device without extracting them.

tar cv file1 file2     

            Write files 'file1' and 'file2' to the default tape device.

tar cvf archive.tar file1 [file2...]  

            Create a tar archive as a file "archive.tar" containing file1,

            file2...etc.

tar xvf archive.tar  extract from the archive file

tar cvfz archive.tar.gz dname    

            Create a gzip compressed tar archive containing everything in the directory

            'dname'. This does not work with all versions of tar.

tar xvfz archive.tar.gz         

            Extract a gzip compressed tar archive.  Does not work with all versions of tar.

tar cvfI archive.tar.bz2 dname  

            Create a bz2 compressed tar archive. Does not work with all versions of tar

File compression: compress, gzip, and bzip2

The standard UNIX compression commands are compress and uncompress. Compressed files have

a suffix .Z added to their name. For example:

compress part.igs    Creates a compressed file part.igs.Z

uncompress part.igs  Uncompresseis part.igs from the compressed file part.igs.Z.

                     Note the .Z is not required.

Another common compression utility is gzip (and gunzip). These are the GNU compress and

uncompress utilities.  gzip usually gives better compression than standard compress,

but may not be installed on all systems.  The suffix for gzipped files is .gz

gzip part.igs     Creates a compressed file part.igs.gz

gunzip part.igs   Extracts the original file from part.igs.gz

The bzip2 utility has (in general) even better compression than gzip, but at the cost of longer

times to compress and uncompress the files. It is not as common a utility as gzip, but is

becoming more generally available.

bzip2 part.igs       Create a compressed Iges file part.igs.bz2

bunzip2 part.igs.bz2 Uncompress the compressed iges file.

Looking for help: The man and apropos commands

Most of the commands have a manual page which give sometimes useful, often more or less

detailed, sometimes cryptic and unfathomable discriptions of their usage. Some say they

are called man pages because they are only for real men.

Example:

man ls      Shows the manual page for the ls command

You can search through the man pages using apropos

Example:

apropos build     Shows a list of all the man pages whose discriptions contain the word "build"

Do a man apropos for detailed help on apropos.

Basics of the  vi editor

                Opening a file

vi filename

                Creating text

Edit modes: These keys enter editing modes and type in the text

of your document.

i     Insert before current cursor position

I     Insert at beginning of current line

a     Insert (append) after current cursor position

A     Append to end of line

r     Replace 1 character

R     Replace mode

<ESC> Terminate insertion or overwrite mode

                 Deletion of text

x     Delete single character

dd    Delete current line and put in buffer

ndd   Delete n lines (n is a number) and put them in buffer

J     Attaches the next line to the end of the current line (deletes carriage return).

                 Oops

u     Undo last command

                 cut and paste

yy    Yank current line into buffer

nyy   Yank n lines into buffer

p     Put the contents of the buffer after the current line

P     Put the contents of the buffer before the current line

                cursor positioning

^d    Page down

^u    Page up

:n    Position cursor at line n

:$    Position cursor at end of file

^g    Display current line number

h,j,k,l Left,Down,Up, and Right respectivly. Your arrow keys should also work if

      if your keyboard mappings are anywhere near sane.

               string substitution

:n1,n2:s/string1/string2/[g]       Substitute string2 for string1 on lines

                                   n1 to n2. If g is included (meaning global), 

                                   all instances of string1 on each line

                                   are substituted. If g is not included,

                                   only the first instance per matching line is

                                   substituted.

    ^ matches start of line

    . matches any single character

    $ matches end of line

These and other "special characters" (like the forward slash) can be "escaped" with \

i.e to match the string "/usr/STRIM100/SOFT" say "\/usr\/STRIM100\/SOFT"

Examples:

:1,$:s/dog/cat/g                   Substitute 'cat' for 'dog', every instance

                                   for the entire file - lines 1 to $ (end of file)

:23,25:/frog/bird/                 Substitute 'bird' for 'frog' on lines

                                   23 through 25. Only the first instance

                                   on each line is substituted.

              Saving and quitting and other "ex" commands

These commands are all prefixed by pressing colon (:) and then entered in the lower

left corner of the window. They are called "ex" commands because they are commands

of the ex text editor - the precursor line editor to the screen editor

vi.   You cannot enter an "ex" command when you are in an edit mode (typing text onto the screen)

Press <ESC> to exit from an editing mode.

:w                Write the current file.

:w new.file       Write the file to the name 'new.file'.

:w! existing.file Overwrite an existing file with the file currently being edited.

:wq               Write the file and quit.

:q                Quit.

:q!               Quit with no changes.

:e filename       Open the file 'filename' for editing.

:set number       Turns on line numbering

:set nonumber     Turns off line numbering

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By Amrut Deshmukh

Author At TechnoSaber