[Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note II] kintwofan:
I can't take it anymore thought I would help out

Hey all. I'm making this thread to compliment the other thread found in this subforum. I really didn't want to fragment the discussion, but it does make sense to split the discussions up into relevant threads, as porting AOSP vs TW is a different process. That, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates a little punctuation in their OPs ;).

Joking aside, lets get down to brass tacks here. Since the LTE variants of the Note 2 all share similar hardware features, it doesn't take much to get ROMs developed for different carriers to work on our handsets. There has been experimentation with this for the last few months, spanning a dozen threads, and a general technique was hewn together based around Scrossler's patch.

Most recently a sort of megathread was posted in this subforum detailing how to 'port' roms to our handset using Scott's patch. This method works pretty well in most cases, but definitely isn't perfect for a couple reasons.

Firstly, Scott's patch really wasn't designed with this in mind. I haven't talked to the man himself, but he basically made it as a way to get stock international n7105 firmware to work on our domestic handsets, and as such is specifically geared towards Touchwiz compatibility. So for porting TW roms over, the patch works fairly well and we'll leave it at that.

However, AOSP is a different beast. Scott's patch contains certain files that are irrelevant on aosp, and even complicate and break certain roms. The other major downside to trying to port with Scott's patch is that it flashes over his build.prop file, which is bad news bears on any rom that isnt stock touchwiz.

So I've sought to refine the porting process a little, just for my own learning and fun, and I've been getting pm's about this so I figured I'd share what I've learned along the way.

This is by no means a complete step by step tutorial, more or less a framework or stepping stone for you guys to start from. I can't guarantee this will work for every rom in every case, but it hasn't failed for me yet. As always, ymmv.

Also I'm not claiming to be a developer or to know any magical secrets, I'm just another xda casual like you who just happened to do a little poking around for curiosity's sake. It's amazing what you can do when you're walking around with the entire collected knowledge of the human race in your pocket :)

Anyways, meandering bull**** is over. I'm more or less pasting this in from my previous explanations, in plain text for humans to understand. Good luck and enjoy!

1. All you need to do is grab a working aosp rom for our device to use as a donor. Either of sbrissen's cyanogenmod roms will work beautifully, just use the version with the base closest to the rom you're porting.

2. Open both roms as archives and first navigate to /system/app/. There are three apks found in the donor rom that start with vzw*. grab these and put them in your working rom.

3. Next, navigate to /system/etc/ and copy the apns-conf.xml from the donor into your working rom, overwriting the original.

4. Lastly, we need to edit the build.prop found in /system/ to correct all the cdma/lte references so the phone behaves in a way that verizon likes. This is the most involved step and the biggest source of error, but it's fairly straight forward when it's all said and done. Either open both build.props side by side, or better yet use a comparison tool to note the differences. Basically the build.prop can be broken into three sections, which you can figure out by the comments in the file. you can skip the first section just to be safe, but if you're really anal you can change all the hardware references from t0lte to t0ltevzw, and to SGH-I605 when necessary.

Again, not something I recommend a beginner worry about and definitely not necessary for getting the port to work. The really crucial information starts after the line "# end build properties " and ends before "# ADDITIONAL BUILD PROPERTIES" Basically, everything that falls in this block is the RIL information that we need to get this stuff working. You can generally just copy the whole block from our donor and overwrite the whole section in our working rom, as most of it will end up being redundant if we leave it in. The best practice would be to go line for line and see what is applicable, basically all the lines referencing SIMs, RIL, radios, cdma, etc. are the lines that we want.

After that, there is only one line in the last block of properties that needs changing, at least in the roms I've ported. This may differ depending on your source, but look for the line "ro.telephony.ril_class=". look carefully and compare it to the corresponding line in the donor rom, if your working rom says anything other than "SamsungCDMAQualcommRIL", change it to read as such.

After that just save that file and you should be fine to flash, just be sure to flash a modem and have a kernel on hand in case the ported one doesn't play nice. Congratulations, hopefully you don't have a $700 paperweight in your hands, enjoy that goodness.

I might as well add that if you want to use this method to port TW roms in a more efficient manner, all you need in addition is Scott's patch, or a VZW TW rom. Patch over the secMMS.apk and SecPhone.apk to your working rom. Copy the /system/csc/ folder over to your rom. Finally copy CSCVersion and SW_configuration to your /system/ folder. Do all that in addition to my above steps and you should be golden.

Sent from my DARK Note 2