[Palm Treo 750 ROM Development] einsteinecker:
FAQs, How to's, and more

Q: So explain to me the Sleep of Death

A: Existent in some WM 6.5 builds, even for other devices, Sleep of Death occurs when you power off the phone either via software or the Red Button, and the phone cannot power on in any way whatsoever, power button, plugging it in, etc. Currently, I have not experienced this in Build 23563, but in Builds 21901/21915. This is probably solved by my battery polling customization, although if it persists, disable auto turn-off for either battery or AC, or you'll have to change your brightness setting due to Palm's Backlight bug. Do note that my Treo's have worked past their service life, and their batteries are less the capacity than they used to be.

Q: What is the Backlight bug?

A: Existent even in Palm's OEM ROMs, the backlight bug is when you have your brightness set to 2, sometimes even 3 (The backlight is rated by 0 - 10, 0 being off, and 10 being the brightest). The Backlight bug occasionally refuses to put the device on standby (more often when plugged into AC), or even turn off the backlight. This is a hardware problem because if you set your Brightness to 2, and put the device on standby when running on battery, you can turn on the device again if you toggle the ringer switch (the switch on the top of the phone). This is a persistent hardware bug, which existed on all the 4 Treo's I have touched so far. (it's how I turn on my keyboard-less Treo)

Q: Can you do ____ language?

A: All my ROM's support multiple languages (although I have never tried making ones other than English). All I would need is the Palm OEM ROM of the language that you want done, then we'll see.

Q: What Kitchen did you use?

A: I use OSKitchen Zero.

Q: Will you upload your kitchen?

A: As you may have heard, there's a ridiculous bandwidth limit on the wireless carrier I currently use (800MB). My kitchen folder reaches 2.02GB (size, not size on disk), and uploading that is now impossible. Even if I separate the parts into individual folder, it's still going to add up to much more than 800MB. So sorry, the idea of uploading my kitchen was only in the event I could not continue. Well, I've gone as far as completed ;)

Q: What happened to Build 21915?

A: It had a fatal bug that would not load some programs, notably .Net CF programs.

Q: Build 21901 help! How do I get rid of that second battery bar?

A: Go to Clocks & Alarms in Start ->Settings->, and then tap that "more" tab, and then check "Display the Clock on the title bar in all programs"

Q: Why can't we tap the Start icon in WM6.5.3?

A: Basically, it's the fault of Palm's OEM today plugin "Active call". This plugin is responsible for the handling of calling-related features of the Treo, from the dialer skin, to the today-screen Softkey options, to the speakerphone activation, to anything that displays call information. Why it interferes with 6.5.3 is best explained in detail. As you may not have known, Windows Mobile is an interesting platform in one respect because of how highly customizable it is. The Palm designed OS is layered like this:

--- <-Palm Active Call Today Plugin

--- <-WM Today theme skin

--- <-Underlying OS

As you can see, Palm's Active Call plugin is covering the Today theme in who handles what the user touches. So when we click on the Start icon, it looks like we pressed it, but we didn't because Palm's plugin is designed for WM5/6, which has a normal softkey bar at the bottom. Their Left Softkey is overlapping the Start icon, so to the OS, we are pressing that spot on the UI, but Palm's plugin is intercepting what it launches by launching nothing, since it was programmed to not launch anything at those coordinates linked to the OS. This can be easily seen by tapping on the xTask icon, and then tap on the Start icon.

Q: So why did you make the Start menu faster and 4 columns?

A: Well, I was a big fan of that start menu layout changer I got here at XDA-devs, but it didn't work on our Treo's. I don't know why it doesn't work, as it works on my hx2415, but I set out to manually edit the Start menu myself. While I will maintain the secret of what I believe made it faster, I decided a 4 column layout was best because, with a 3 column layout, it takes longer to scroll because our screens are about 2.5 inches, which is really not a lot of real estate for the primary scrolling finger (our thumbs). So if you are wondering why it lags a bit, that's because you are seeing 8 full icons and 2 half icons, compared to only 6 in the 3 column layout, and the device scales the icons depending on their default size (program dependent).

Q: Can you take out ____ program?

A: Due to my lame internet connection, I can't be doing things that could break 1 person's functionality, while helping 1 person's desire. I try to do a ROM that works for the general user, and not for a power user like me (It's why I didn't see the SMS tone bug until later, because I didn't care for that :S)

Q: Huh? XPR compression?

A: ROM's are loaded onto a device in 3 types, a non-compressed ROM image, a compressed ROM image, and a Super compressed ROM image. non-compressed uses up a large amount of space, a compressed image (XPR) uses about half the space available to the Treo, and a Super compressed (LZX) image uses even less space. These of course, have their drawbacks. Uncompressed ROM images uses up a whole lot of space, but is quick to access the Windows Mobile parts. XPR is compressed to fit in a reasonable amount of space, and is a bit slower to access than uncompressed. LZX is tightly compressed, and while you use up even less space, the ROM is very tightly packed in that the CPU needs a little more extra time to read WM elements of the OS. An example is like this, between XPR and LZX, say you have a box, and you put things in it. If you stuff it with as much as you can to save space (LZX), you may have saved space, but trying to get things inside that box will take a little more extra digging. With a more tidy stuffing of the box (XPR), if you properly set things inside the box, accessing the things inside will be much quicker.

Q: Explain to me "Big Storage".

A: I made a graphic explaining this, but basically, Big Storage is the removal of the ExtendedROM partition that exists in the HTC devices during the Hermes era. The ExtROM is what holds Carrier-specific settings/bloatware that you see in the Palm OEM ROMs. This is a problem with Custom ROMs, because we use the "unbranding" procedure to delete the stuff in the ExtROM, but the partition itself is not deleted. This is where Big Storage comes in. Big Storage has no record of the ExtROM whatsoever, so it re-formats the rest of the available storage as one whole Storage space for the user to use. I have seen this have a great boost in speed with the Operating System, as the device no longer has to mount (and hide) another partition on the Flash chip. So far no other ROM besides my Hermann series has been able to do this.