Jelly Bean 4.2.2 On Nexus One

By Akbar • March 6th, 2013

I have been using the Jelly Bean 4.2.2 – v4.7 for few days now, and I must say that it’s working great so far. I covered all the installation steps and tricks in the previous article:
Installing Jelly Beans on Nexus One

However, with time, I learned something more about this ROM, and applied few more tricks to get a very smooth running Jelly Bean on my Nexus One (haven’t had a single crash since last 4 days). I thought to share these with others using the same (or similar ROMs) and see if this helps you guys too. So, here these are:

1: Custom Camera Application
The Camera in this ROM works, but it’s just functional i.e. the picture quality is very bad. I know the N1 camera quality is great, because I have used this a lot in Gingerbread and loved the quality. Fortunately, there are some workarounds available. The simplest is to use 3rd Party camera application from the Google Play store. The one I’m using and highly recommend are:
Camera ZOOM FX
HDR Camera

You will get way good quality pictures with these applications than the stock camera application.

2: Use SD Card Booster
I recommend installing some SD Card Booster form the Google App Store. There are many, but I tried the following and it works well for me:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sdincrease.it

For my SD-Card, I got best performance with 1024 size. You can try few values on your system, and see which one works well for you. Once configured properly, you should get some good speed in running applications and playing movies from the SD-Card.

3: Install/Update Google Search
Go to Google Play store, search for “Google Search” and it will let you install or update the Google Search version. With this, you can use the voice search and input using the keyboard. It still needs the Internet (no offline version available yet) but still it’s better than nothing.

4: Integrate Link2SD
If you are using the Jelly Bean or any other custom ROM which provides the ROOT access, then I think this is the must have application for you. You can download Link2SD this from Google PlyStore. The configuration is simple, and there are many tutorials on how to setup this. So, I will not go into that detail. However, I would recommend one thing special, and that’s if you are using this ROM, partition your SD-Ext as FAT32 (instead of Ext2, Ext3 or Ext4). Though the linux paritions like EXT3 or EXT4 works, I had lot of permission issues using these. But FAT32 worked very well for me. If you are using Windows, you can use the MiniTool Partition tool to format your SD-Card. Again, there are many online tutorial on how to do that, so will not go in these details.

Note: Link2SD can’t work be juxtaposed with A2SD or similar scripts. So, if you want to use this, don’t use built-in A2SD or any other SD-Ext manager application.

5: Keep Dalvik Cache in Internal Memory
If you have low access speed SD-Card, then you may find it better to keep the Dalvik Cache in the internal memory. Doing this I have found the application to be more responsive and speedy. I’m not a guru on Android architecture, so may be there are some shortfalls of this, but so far this (keeping Dalvik Cahce in internal memory) has been working great for me. So, other thing I did different for Jelly Bean 4.2.1, is to keep the Dalvik Cache in internal memory. If you followed that ROM steps, for A2SD install, you need to do this in terminal:

1
2
3
4
5

# su
# a2sd install
N
N
Y

This means that you may have to keep cleaning up the Dalvik Cache from time to time. But fortunately you can do this from Recovery (I’m using CynogenMod Recovery). When you do this, system will build the cache again on next start-up. It should work well if you have comparatively low number of applications.

Note: If you want to use the A2SD, then you must have the Ext2 or Ext4 as second partition. Having the Fat32 as second partition works well with Link2SD, but doesn’t work with A2SD (and it doesn’t complain about this either). It simply will not move the cache.

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 6th, 2013 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Android. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.