[Galaxy S I9000 General] RobWilcox:
[size=+2]Installing insanity[/size]

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I have a regular Samsung Galaxy S. Well I did have until today, and I ventured through the installation of the insanity ROM. By regular, I mean very, very, very, ordinary.. I’ve not even root’ed by Galaxy. So to get to a nice stable working insanity Galaxy S, I performed the following steps :

What is insanity?

insanity ROM is a basic, small, light-weight ROM that focuses on core functionality and speed. It is <70 Mb of installation if your phone is already root’ed. It also supports tweaking the DPI so that you can have almost any resolution you like (depending on the screensize of your phone).

Safety Copy

As I’m fairly cautious I wanted to make sure I had a copy of my data, and had the ability to “go back” to the stock phone.

To get a copy of the data, I installed the Samsung USB drivers (my other machine uses Kies, but it’s not powered up right now). You can get the drivers part way down this page :

EZBase Downloads or the direct link:

Samsung USB Drivers (x64)

Samsung USB Drivers (x86)​

After installing the driver (no reboot required) I then go in to the phone settings and turn on USB debugging, and plug the phone in. It then appears as a Windows device. After that I copied all of the files from my device to a temporary place on TWO of my desktop computers!

Going back to the beginning .. well I hope I never have to, but if I do, I already downloaded the original ROM from : Stock Firmwares for Samsung Galaxy S I9000 Thread - This is my base release : I9000BUJG2|2.1|2010 July

EZBase

This is the forum page for EZBase

Basically I followed in the instructions in the PDF which is located off that page. You download EZOdin, EZBase.pit, and the three files ending in MD5. One of those is 250Mb+ so it takes a bit of time. You then have to restart your phone in download mode… to do that power off the device, press the volume down button, the home button, and the power button.. then wait a few seconds for the splash screen to appear and let go of the buttons. The phone should go in to Download mode.

Once you’re there, run EZOdin, per the guide in the above link, and maybe 5 minutes later all will be rebooted. Your phone will already probably look considerably different! At this point you can plug the phone back in, and copy the insanity zip file to the /sd folder… ready for the next step.

During the installation of EZBase it might do a few quirky half reboots, that’s all fine, it’s installing a new kernel and mode, and it’s meant to behave a bit oddly whilst doing that !

Recovery mode to get the insanity ROM installed

You then have to restart your phone in Recovery Mode. This time it’s volume up, home, and the power on button.. for a few seconds, then when the logo appears, let go of the buttons. Once in recovery mode follow the screenshots on the insanity forum page for the steps to follow, and in a few minutes you’ll have a rebooted phone with insanity installed.

Tweaks / Post Installation

Unlike many ROMs out there the insanity ROM is very small – less than 70 Mb. So there are quite a few apps which aren’t installed any longer, but, you can get them back with nitrality. Here is a run down of the things that I’ve done so far :

I checked my gallery and my music – it’s all still there ?

Open nitrality (you might get warned about it taking super user access, just accept that). Go to UI Tweaks and then tick the box saying “Application scaling”. Old applications will now hopefully behave nicely.

Whilst still in the UI Tweaks section I changed Popup Animations and Transition Animations to fast, and checked the box next to Fancy Input Animations

Now in nitrality, open Applications (and wait a little bit if it is the first time you have run it). Scroll down to near the bottom and install the Voice Recorder. It’ll record all your incoming and outgoing phone calls by default !

Tweak what gets recorded.. because you might not be quite as paranoid as peoples say! Swipe the home screen downwards, and the phone will appear (or open Applications). Click Recording Settings, and then tick the boxes next to either incoming or outgoing, or whatever you prefer.

Whilst in the Recording Setting page consider turning off the “Disable increasing ringtone” by ticking the box at the top.

Customise swipe bindings by going into Preferences from the home screen, and click on Action Bindings. By default Swipe Down is set to “Open Dialer” as an example.

Install the Gmail addon if required, from the insanity page.. you have to restart (one more time) into Recovery Mode to do that … but you don’t have to do some complicated finger pressing any more. Hold the power button down as though you are going to switch it off, and choose Recovery in the list.

I then dragged and dropped the following to the home screen :

- Phone

- Gallery

- Camera

- Gmail (On launching Gmail I had to set up my account again but that’s fine.)

Next up for me, is to install :

My To Do List manager

My Flickr Uploader

And I want to test GPS, when I go outside (but it’s cold today)

Maybe now will be the time when I investigate some other apps that do those jobs!

I have to say there was a bit of a hairy moment or 5, when it appears that I was touched by the 50% on Cell Standby "bug".. I got that sorted thanks to Nitr8 and TrOjAnUK. I think it was a mixture of turning off HSPDA, and the new XXJVK modem suggested by TrOjAnUK, and, the in-and-out-of-air-plane-mode. Have a look at the battery post for more details.