[Acer Iconia Tab A100] nsha2012:
I think every body should have the source to information so they can better understand what they are messing with... why waste time waiting and begging for food when you can learn to cook for yourself?! ... so here is my tutorial on breaking down CyanogenMod9 on the Acer A100( although most of this should be a general guideline to most roms) ***** I am not responsible for you breaking your stuff nor responsible what you do with this information... you have been warned! u can soft brick your tab in a heartbeat***

okay so there are countless tutorials on how to build a ROM from source... just google it.. but some ppl obviously don't have the need to spend the hours compiling because there is already a build for the ROM that they like... but on the other hand they want to add some mods and tweaks to the zip before flashing to tweak the tab to how they want it... after all it is your device and your the one that uses it most so why wouldn't you want personalized tweaks... and theres only one way to learn.. trial and error! haha but hopefully this guide will help you grasp some basic to advanced Android tweaks and mods ... again this tutorial is written for CM9 for the acer a100 but the "general" idea is about the same on the basic stuff... this tutorial is written by me from many sources too many to name but thanks for all the tutorials or I wouldn't know a lot of what I know about Android... This guide is for Ubuntu 12.04... but I would assume 10.04+ it would be compatible but don't quote me on that as I don't know so its your fault if you f* something up!!!!

First off you have your cm9.zip... its simply a zipped archive.. dur... sometimes a signed zip.. now you can simply open nautilus file explorer and go to your .zip and extract it with archive manager.. I suggest when the dialog comes up as where to extract the files that you click make a new folder and name it extractedCM9 and let it extract... okay not so hard quite yet 'eh?.. hang in there it gets a lot better :) ... you should now have a folder named extractedCM9 with some files in it... copy the extractedCM9 folder and paste it into the same directory that your copying from... rename the folder tweaked then cut and past that folder into extractedCM9... next open the extracted CM9... you should see the following: META-INF(a directory), system(a directory), and boot.img( this holds your initrd which is your "ramdisk", your zImage which is your kernal, and on extracting you'll also find a boot.cfg... we will get to extracting the boot image latter.. stick with the easier things to get us going!... now create another directory called stock .. you should now have the following... META-INF/(a directory), system/(a directory), stock/(a directory), tweaked(a directory), and boot.img.. okay a little more copying and pasting.. all this will be used later so if following this tutorial all the way throu you should do as instructed lol... CUT META-INF/, system/, and boot.img and paste it into stock.. you should be left with the two directories tweaked/ and stock/ both having extracted CM9 in them go into your tweaked/ directory and lets begin.... so some of the things you can tweak just from a simple extraction of the zip are as follows...

You can edit your /system directory and make tweaks as needed before ever installing the rom! .. just some of the things held in /system is the boot animation and it can be found at /system/media/bootanimation.zip its also a simple zip composed of images to be ran concurrent to appear as a single animation.. the resolution for the a100 boot animation is 1024x600 and a simple google search for either a100 custom boot animations or basically any low-def 1024x600 boot animation should work simply delete the existing bootanimation and copy the new one in its place.. remember NO MATTER WHAT THE DOWNLOAD FILE NAME is you MUST rename it to be bootanimation.zip or it wont work( I say should because I obviously have not tried every boot animation and I know there is a limit to the size for the acer animation so sticking with <6mb bootanimations should be just fine).. now if you decide to go further and extract the cm9 boot animation you will find part0( a directory), part1( a directory) and desc.txt.. the part0 and part1 directories hold the images that are to be ran and desc.txt simply states the resolution and then below that it list the directories that are included in the zip... part01 will be ran before part02.. for the novice I recommend just sticking to finding cool bootanimations already zipped for our resolution that some has posted for download so you can simply copy and past!...

also in system/media/ you will find a directory named audio.. dive into that and you find where the default sounds(aka ringtones, notifacations) that are stored for your fresh rom go back up a directory to system/media/ again and you'll see the video.. those are just some mp4's stored for the ROM.... that about it for editing in media.. lets recap.. you can basically edit/ change your boot animation and the default ringtones and notification sounds in /system/media... lets move back up to /system..

from /system you see another directory user/ ... lets go in there for a second.. what do we find.. MORE directories of course lol.. what else would we find... keychars( a directory) and keylayout( a directory) contain your configuration files for the input keys.. you can find things for the way game controllers and keyboards input are handled and what codes on keypresses.. now for our device if you proceed into keylayout/ (system/usr/keylayout/) you will see a file called gpio-keys.kl right clicking on that file and selecting open with and choosing gedit will bring up the file and you will see someything like

key 136 SEARCH WAKE_DROPPED

key 139 MENU WAKE

key 102 HOME

... and so on.....

these are what your hardware buttons do.. basically to explain whats going on is the key ### is the hardwired part... the SEARCH or MENU or what ever action you see is simply that.. an action to be called... and the WAKE_DROPPED and WAKE... well to be honest I'm not for sure what those do lol I assume having WAKE associated with a key would wake the device when pressed.. not for sure on that one thou haven't tried it.. but a quick google search and you can find list of commands that you can choose from.. one of them is being the command to call the camera.. so in essence you could bind any of your hardware keys to the camera function and it would open the camera... my little tweak to this file is to completely disable the HARDWARE HOME KEY... the only key on the front of our devices.. now I have seen some tutorials no disabling it by changing the...

key 102 HOME

... to ...

key 102 UKNOWN

... my problem with that is it does seem to disable the key.. sorta.. and what I mean by that is when you are in certain apps it will trigger the select/ hover action like if you were using a keyboard... so to completely disable it where it will call NO action simply DELETE that line! change ..

key 102 HOME

... to ...

... lol just delete that line out of the file and save it... voila! no more hitting it on mistake while playing a game or browser or w.e it is your doing *** note that this will not disable the light on the button.. it will still flash for notifications and the like...

alright once you have that saved you can exit out of gedit and go back to nautilus showing your extracted cm9 files go up your directory tree until your back in tweaked/ looking at META-INF/, system/, boot.img ... highlight all three of those... right click again and hit compress.. name the file myCM9tweak.zip or w/e you want to call it... make sure .zip is selected in the drop down menu of type of format to compress and compress... once its done you have an unsigned tweaked CM9.zip that if you didn't make any mistakes will boot.. and even if you made mistakes it could possibly boot and you will find your errors as you use it.. now if you just stuck with the simple tweaks I should you above you should be pretty safe and not worry to much about the device not booting.. if it doesn't boot a stock .zip then go back to your tweaked/ folder and try and find out what you did wrong and compress again about try it out! ... okay my fingures are tired of typing so I'm done with the tutorial for tonight.. well I might add more tonight but don't hold me to it... but this tutorial is in NO WAY finished... we are just beginning.. I haven't even showed you how to unpack-edit- and repack your boot.img to swap out kernals and from there extracting your initrd( aka "ramdisk") so you cant edit things at the very core of the ROM... don't be mad if you made the stock/ and tweaked/ directories and are wondering what the hell i had you make two directories of the same crap... just remember this tutorial is at its very begin if you plan on unpacking boot.img's with me then you need to just follow along... for what I have showed you tonight you can do this from windows of course and using notepad instead of gedit... for the advanced stuff sorry your going to need Ubuntu! ...

MORE TO COME...

--more simple system tweaks and mods--

--unpacking-modifying- and repacking boot.img's--

--extracting initrd's( aka "ramdisk") to make edits to the core of your rom and of course repacking them--

I hope someone finds some kind of useful information out of this.. tonight was pretty basic stuff but theres a lot more coming... including but not limited to a whole bunch of command prompt!

*~ENJOY~*

(please excuse any typo's.. I don't think theres any where it count's :) ..)