Root [T-Mobile/MetroPCS] [BETA] [4.4.4] Cyanogenmod 11 Unofficial

[Anubis2k3]

Got it to boot once, but now it won't boot. Any ideas?

I've wiped multiple times and re-flashed. Get stuck at loading screen...

 

[xclusive36]

Got it to boot once, but now it won't boot. Any ideas?

I've wiped multiple times and re-flashed. Get stuck at loading screen...

Sounds like you flashed the wrong recovery and changed your aboot image. Flash the correct recovery and then flash the rom again

 

[Anubis2k3]

Sounds like you flashed the wrong recovery and changed your aboot image. Flash the correct recovery and then flash the rom again

Oh, you have to use TWRP to flash this? I've been using CWM the whole time I've had the phone and never switched because I never had to. Figured the instructions were for people that weren't rooted yet. Me and my noobish thoughts...lol Thanks for the help!

 

[xclusive36]

No, cwm will work

 

[Anubis2k3]

Then what did I do wrong?

 

[xclusive36]

I don't know. But reinstall the recovery and then reinstall the rom to see if that helps

 

[Anubis2k3]

Weird. Okay, I am going to switch to TWRP anyways.

As it is, I like the full touch experience that TWRP has to offer. Thanks for your help again!

 

[AquaVolt]

I'm pretty sure you need to install aboot first, so CWM probably will work as long as you install the aboot.

 

[Anubis2k3]

I'm pretty sure you need to install aboot first, so CWM probably will work as long as you install the aboot.

So I saw this aboot requirement, but thought that it had to do with rooting. Seeing as it's been so long since I rooted this phone I thought I had already done this, but I guess this could be my issue. What is aboot and what is it's purpose? The thread never really explains what it is....

EDIT: What GAPPS should I be using for this ROM? Every one I seem to download to try isn't working. Keeps erroring out on me at install.

 

[xclusive36]

Look in the web for a kitkat gapps

 

[AquaVolt]

Look in the web for a kitkat gapps

Gapps for any kitkat CM11 rom will work?

 

[xclusive36]

Gapps for any kitkat CM11 rom will work?

Yup.

 

[Anubis2k3]

Well I downloaded multiple type's of the package and non worked correctly. There was one that at least installed the Play Store for me, but nothing else, so that was okay.

Bug Report: Small bug with adding widgets. Every time I try to add the Clock Widget to my home screen using GNL the phone will freeze up on me and just vibrate uncontrollably until I reboot. Not a big deal, might be the launcher, but I haven't tried it on any other launcher yet.

Wifi works great and it appears that I have LTE, however I do not have service at this time so I cannot confirm that it works or not.

 

[Anubis2k3]

Keep getting random reboots. Going to run a logcat and will post the output if it happens again.

 

[RainbouJ]

Alright, so I've been using this ROM for a while now and I wanna share my experiences with it.

The Android 4.4.4 KitKat experience is VERY nice and I definitely like it more than the stock Jelly Bean that this phone came with. The new notification panel works very well and I can customize it how I like. As for Cyanogenmod itself, the rom does come with some nice features like the screen off animation that I could never get to work on the stock roms of this device. Also the extra options in the settings that allow me to tweak even the performance of the cpu(underclocking if I want to save battery) is nice. The system RAM usage is pretty low and my phone feels a lot faster too. Overall, the experience is really really good and I don't think I want go back to Jelly Bean anymore.

However, I know this ROM is in BETA right now so I'll also talk about some bugs I encountered.

First of all, before even turning on the phone, if I plug in the device into a charger, the screen will come on and show the battery charging animation for a few seconds before the animation disappears. Now this is okay, except that the screen itself does not turn off. The screen stays blank, but the screen backlight remains on. The phone is still OFF now but is plugged into a charger. Btw, the custom charging animation for when the phone is off looks really nice.

Another (not really a bug, just a slight annoyance) is when the phone is turned on, the bootup animation has a noticeable delay. The screen backlight would come on but it would take a couple of moments for the cyanogemmod bootup animation to start. Again, this isn't really a serous issue, just something I noticed.

After booting up the phone, I noticed that my mobile signal connection is quite low, as in I'm getting 1 or 2 bars out of 5 bars. On stock I would get 3 or 4 bars for the signal strength, HOWEVER, even though it displays less bars, I did not notice any difference in the reliability or speed when using applications that use mobile data. Also I'm a MetroPCS user, so it might affect me because I noticed that the ROM is built for T-mobile devices since the phone says P-659 instead of MS-659. I live in a pretty large city so mobile signal isn't an issue for me.

Now the next bug can be bad if encountered for the first time without knowing. When using the default home launcher for this cyanogenmod rom, (Trebuchet I believe?), if I enable the "Search Panel" option in the launcher settings, the home launcher will crash repeatedly and spam the "Trebuchet has crashed" notification. Now I found that to fix this, I just pulled down the notification and opened the Settings where I had to find the Trebuchet app and clear the app data. This shouldn't be a problem for people who use other launchers though(i.e. nova launcher).

After using the phone for a while, I decided to charge it starting from 47%. Usually the phone would charge after about 1-2 hours and reach 100%. However, after a couple hours, I checked and the charge was at 92% and would charge very very slowly. I mean this phone took an additional hour to charge from 92% to 100%. Maybe it's just my battery but I found this to be strange.

Another pretty bad bug is when I want to use a pattern lockscreen. Of course there is the option for a 3 x 3 lockscreen, but I'm pretty paranoid about people snooping on my phone so I decided to get crazy and use one of the larger pattern lockscreens, like the 4x4 or even 5x5 ones. When setting those up, if I glide my finger through a lot of those dots to set up the pattern really quickly, the phone would lock up immediately and vibrate until I pulled the battery. I tried to setup the pattern lock twice but both times the phone would lock up on itself. So I stuck with the standard 3 x 3 pattern lock which still works fine.

The home button led for this phone also doesn't work. (I think you already knew this one, so sorry if I'm bringing it up again.) Except when powering the phone on, it would glow and alternate between the colors like normally.

Finally, the last sort-of issue I found so far with this ROM is the in-call volume. When talking with others on the phone, their voices would sound a lot more quiet to me, and I have the volume set to max. The in-call volume isn't too quiet that I can't hear them, but coming from a stock rom, the device does sound noticeably more quiet when compared.

Now again, I know you worked very hard to get cyanogenmod to the F3 and it's still not fully developed yet (Beta-ish state), but I have to say that overall this ROM still provides a very nice experience for me with the F3. Everytime I use my phone now, I feel as though new life was breathed into it and it's quite enjoyable to use. When this phone first came out, people all over this forum were hoping that a KitKat update would come to this device for so long. Now that you brought Kitkat to the F3, I can see why people were so excited for it. This ROM is amazing and I think that even though there are some bugs with it, I still would still rather use it as my daily driver than go back to a Jelly Bean ROM.

Good Job daemon32! Looking forward for more updates!

 

[xclusive36]

Yeah, it's not a daily driver yet. It's getting close. It's very much a work in progress.

 

[AquaVolt]

Nice bug report, that should help identify many bugs. The rom is coming along pretty nicely, but there are random things like that which prevent it from being a daily driver.

 

[daemon32]

Sorry I've been missing for so long, I've just had a bunch of surgery done

First of all, before even turning on the phone, if I plug in the device into a charger, the screen will come on and show the battery charging animation for a few seconds before the animation disappears. Now this is okay, except that the screen itself does not turn off. The screen stays blank, but the screen backlight remains on. The phone is still OFF now but is plugged into a charger. Btw, the custom charging animation for when the phone is off looks really nice.

This happens (I think) because we replaced the stock LG charger binary (in the ramdisk) with the one that gets compiled along with the rest of cyanogenmod. It's a bit buggy on this hardware, and I wonder if I can try one from the S4 Mini (which is where a bunch of the binary blobs on this rom come from, as it has the same SoC)

Another (not really a bug, just a slight annoyance) is when the phone is turned on, the bootup animation has a noticeable delay. The screen backlight would come on but it would take a couple of moments for the cyanogemmod bootup animation to start. Again, this isn't really a serous issue, just something I noticed.

Yeah... That's because when the LG logo animation finishes, it blanks the screen, and it's supposed to show a static LG logo between the ramdisk, and the bootanimation but I don't remember how to get that to work exactly...

After booting up the phone, I noticed that my mobile signal connection is quite low, as in I'm getting 1 or 2 bars out of 5 bars. On stock I would get 3 or 4 bars for the signal strength, HOWEVER, even though it displays less bars, I did not notice any difference in the reliability or speed when using applications that use mobile data. Also I'm a MetroPCS user, so it might affect me because I noticed that the ROM is built for T-mobile devices since the phone says P-659 instead of MS-659. I live in a pretty large city so mobile signal isn't an issue for me.

I'm willing to bet that's because I'm using, as I mentioned before, some blobs from the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (including the RIL library). This caused HSPA+ to stop working and GPS to act strangely, but it works just well enough to be reasonable. Oh, and can you confirm that the MS-659 is actually purely on Metro's T-Mobile GSM network?

Now the next bug can be bad if encountered for the first time without knowing. When using the default home launcher for this cyanogenmod rom, (Trebuchet I believe?), if I enable the "Search Panel" option in the launcher settings, the home launcher will crash repeatedly and spam the "Trebuchet has crashed" notification. Now I found that to fix this, I just pulled down the notification and opened the Settings where I had to find the Trebuchet app and clear the app data. This shouldn't be a problem for people who use other launchers though(i.e. nova launcher).

This is most likely related to the vibrator issue that I saw, by enabling a passcode and mashing the numbers on it, or adding a widget to a homescreen that is too full.

After using the phone for a while, I decided to charge it starting from 47%. Usually the phone would charge after about 1-2 hours and reach 100%. However, after a couple hours, I checked and the charge was at 92% and would charge very very slowly. I mean this phone took an additional hour to charge from 92% to 100%. Maybe it's just my battery but I found this to be strange.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what's going on there... Maybe I can find a way to profile the battery... It could also be that the percentage is being honest, as when you leave the phone plugged in to 100%, it stops charging and discharges until it's safe to start charging again, but that amount of loss would also mean that there is something fishy going on here...

Another pretty bad bug is when I want to use a pattern lockscreen. Of course there is the option for a 3 x 3 lockscreen, but I'm pretty paranoid about people snooping on my phone so I decided to get crazy and use one of the larger pattern lockscreens, like the 4x4 or even 5x5 ones. When setting those up, if I glide my finger through a lot of those dots to set up the pattern really quickly, the phone would lock up immediately and vibrate until I pulled the battery. I tried to setup the pattern lock twice but both times the phone would lock up on itself. So I stuck with the standard 3 x 3 pattern lock which still works fine.

That's a bug in Trebuchet and Lockscreen, I'm not entirely sure why this happens (as the AOSP keyboard app doesn't cause the phone to lock up) but I'm certain that it's something hackish going in in Trebuchet... A passcode lockscreen does the same thing if you mashed the numbers (as I said above). One way I found to prevent this from happening at all was to disable vibrate on touch in settings -> sound.

The home button led for this phone also doesn't work. (I think you already knew this one, so sorry if I'm bringing it up again.) Except when powering the phone on, it would glow and alternate between the colors like normally.

Yeah, aboot turns on the LED gradient animation at boot, and the ramdisk has commands to turn it off. Xclusive36 got the button to work in JB, but I haven't tested the liblights he used, as I don't want to possibly screw up the backlight for right now.

Finally, the last sort-of issue I found so far with this ROM is the in-call volume. When talking with others on the phone, their voices would sound a lot more quiet to me, and I have the volume set to max. The in-call volume isn't too quiet that I can't hear them, but coming from a stock rom, the device does sound noticeably more quiet when compared.

I'm not sure I can even fix that. It appears to have something to do with the QDSP (the special Qualcomm Digital Signal Processor) that handles encoding, decoding and mixing audio for phone calls (the bug also affects skype). Phone calls don't even happen on the SoC's application processor, it's all done by the radio processor (baseband) and the QDSP. It may, however, be that cyanogenmod isn't telling the QDSP to raise the volume to the max.

Now again, I know you worked very hard to get cyanogenmod to the F3 and it's still not fully developed yet (Beta-ish state), but I have to say that overall this ROM still provides a very nice experience for me with the F3. Everytime I use my phone now, I feel as though new life was breathed into it and it's quite enjoyable to use. When this phone first came out, people all over this forum were hoping that a KitKat update would come to this device for so long. Now that you brought Kitkat to the F3, I can see why people were so excited for it. This ROM is amazing and I think that even though there are some bugs with it, I still would still rather use it as my daily driver than go back to a Jelly Bean ROM.

Good Job daemon32! Looking forward for more updates!

Thank you! I really appreciate it when my work makes people happy!

 

[xclusive36]

Sorry I've been missing for so long, I've just had a bunch of surgery done



This happens (I think) because we replaced the stock LG charger binary (in the ramdisk) with the one that gets compiled along with the rest of cyanogenmod. It's a bit buggy on this hardware, and I wonder if I can try one from the S4 Mini (which is where a bunch of the binary blobs on this rom come from, as it has the same SoC)



Yeah... That's because when the LG logo animation finishes, it blanks the screen, and it's supposed to show a static LG logo between the ramdisk, and the bootanimation but I don't remember how to get that to work exactly...



I'm willing to bet that's because I'm using, as I mentioned before, some blobs from the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (including the RIL library). This caused HSPA+ to stop working and GPS to act strangely, but it works just well enough to be reasonable. Oh, and can you confirm that the MS-659 is actually purely on Metro's T-Mobile GSM network?



This is most likely related to the vibrator issue that I saw, by enabling a passcode and mashing the numbers on it, or adding a widget to a homescreen that is too full.



Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what's going on there... Maybe I can find a way to profile the battery... It could also be that the percentage is being honest, as when you leave the phone plugged in to 100%, it stops charging and discharges until it's safe to start charging again, but that amount of loss would also mean that there is something fishy going on here...



That's a bug in Trebuchet and Lockscreen, I'm not entirely sure why this happens (as the AOSP keyboard app doesn't cause the phone to lock up) but I'm certain that it's something hackish going in in Trebuchet... A passcode lockscreen does the same thing if you mashed the numbers (as I said above). One way I found to prevent this from happening at all was to disable vibrate on touch in settings -> sound.



Yeah, aboot turns on the LED gradient animation at boot, and the ramdisk has commands to turn it off. Xclusive36 got the button to work in JB, but I haven't tested the liblights he used, as I don't want to possibly screw up the backlight for right now.



I'm not sure I can even fix that. It appears to have something to do with the QDSP (the special Qualcomm Digital Signal Processor) that handles encoding, decoding and mixing audio for phone calls (the bug also affects skype). Phone calls don't even happen on the SoC's application processor, it's all done by the radio processor (baseband) and the QDSP. It may, however, be that cyanogenmod isn't telling the QDSP to raise the volume to the max.



Thank you! I really appreciate it when my work makes people happy!

I got the animation to work. I haven't posted it yet.

 

[xclusive36]

Sorry I've been missing for so long, I've just had a bunch of surgery done



This happens (I think) because we replaced the stock LG charger binary (in the ramdisk) with the one that gets compiled along with the rest of cyanogenmod. It's a bit buggy on this hardware, and I wonder if I can try one from the S4 Mini (which is where a bunch of the binary blobs on this rom come from, as it has the same SoC)



Yeah... That's because when the LG logo animation finishes, it blanks the screen, and it's supposed to show a static LG logo between the ramdisk, and the bootanimation but I don't remember how to get that to work exactly...



I'm willing to bet that's because I'm using, as I mentioned before, some blobs from the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (including the RIL library). This caused HSPA+ to stop working and GPS to act strangely, but it works just well enough to be reasonable. Oh, and can you confirm that the MS-659 is actually purely on Metro's T-Mobile GSM network?



This is most likely related to the vibrator issue that I saw, by enabling a passcode and mashing the numbers on it, or adding a widget to a homescreen that is too full.



Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what's going on there... Maybe I can find a way to profile the battery... It could also be that the percentage is being honest, as when you leave the phone plugged in to 100%, it stops charging and discharges until it's safe to start charging again, but that amount of loss would also mean that there is something fishy going on here...



That's a bug in Trebuchet and Lockscreen, I'm not entirely sure why this happens (as the AOSP keyboard app doesn't cause the phone to lock up) but I'm certain that it's something hackish going in in Trebuchet... A passcode lockscreen does the same thing if you mashed the numbers (as I said above). One way I found to prevent this from happening at all was to disable vibrate on touch in settings -> sound.



Yeah, aboot turns on the LED gradient animation at boot, and the ramdisk has commands to turn it off. Xclusive36 got the button to work in JB, but I haven't tested the liblights he used, as I don't want to possibly screw up the backlight for right now.



I'm not sure I can even fix that. It appears to have something to do with the QDSP (the special Qualcomm Digital Signal Processor) that handles encoding, decoding and mixing audio for phone calls (the bug also affects skype). Phone calls don't even happen on the SoC's application processor, it's all done by the radio processor (baseband) and the QDSP. It may, however, be that cyanogenmod isn't telling the QDSP to raise the volume to the max.



Thank you! I really appreciate it when my work makes people happy!

The vibration is unstable and is the cause for most of the issues including random reboots. I've removed it from the next update that Ive been testing before I upload

 

[xclusive36]

Sorry I've been missing for so long, I've just had a bunch of surgery done



This happens (I think) because we replaced the stock LG charger binary (in the ramdisk) with the one that gets compiled along with the rest of cyanogenmod. It's a bit buggy on this hardware, and I wonder if I can try one from the S4 Mini (which is where a bunch of the binary blobs on this rom come from, as it has the same SoC)



Yeah... That's because when the LG logo animation finishes, it blanks the screen, and it's supposed to show a static LG logo between the ramdisk, and the bootanimation but I don't remember how to get that to work exactly...



I'm willing to bet that's because I'm using, as I mentioned before, some blobs from the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (including the RIL library). This caused HSPA+ to stop working and GPS to act strangely, but it works just well enough to be reasonable. Oh, and can you confirm that the MS-659 is actually purely on Metro's T-Mobile GSM network?



This is most likely related to the vibrator issue that I saw, by enabling a passcode and mashing the numbers on it, or adding a widget to a homescreen that is too full.



Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what's going on there... Maybe I can find a way to profile the battery... It could also be that the percentage is being honest, as when you leave the phone plugged in to 100%, it stops charging and discharges until it's safe to start charging again, but that amount of loss would also mean that there is something fishy going on here...



That's a bug in Trebuchet and Lockscreen, I'm not entirely sure why this happens (as the AOSP keyboard app doesn't cause the phone to lock up) but I'm certain that it's something hackish going in in Trebuchet... A passcode lockscreen does the same thing if you mashed the numbers (as I said above). One way I found to prevent this from happening at all was to disable vibrate on touch in settings -> sound.



Yeah, aboot turns on the LED gradient animation at boot, and the ramdisk has commands to turn it off. Xclusive36 got the button to work in JB, but I haven't tested the liblights he used, as I don't want to possibly screw up the backlight for right now.



I'm not sure I can even fix that. It appears to have something to do with the QDSP (the special Qualcomm Digital Signal Processor) that handles encoding, decoding and mixing audio for phone calls (the bug also affects skype). Phone calls don't even happen on the SoC's application processor, it's all done by the radio processor (baseband) and the QDSP. It may, however, be that cyanogenmod isn't telling the QDSP to raise the volume to the max.



Thank you! I really appreciate it when my work makes people happy!

It think that is a build.prop issue.

 

[RainbouJ]

I'm willing to bet that's because I'm using, as I mentioned before, some blobs from the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (including the RIL library). This caused HSPA+ to stop working and GPS to act strangely, but it works just well enough to be reasonable. Oh, and can you confirm that the MS-659 is actually purely on Metro's T-Mobile GSM network?

Ok, I believe I was completely mistaken about the mobile signal strength bug.

On stock ROMS, the notification bar does not display the signal strength for mobile data but instead, it just displays whether 4G Lte, 4G, 2G, or G is available. The signal bars on the stock ROM refers to the signal strength used to make phone calls. I think this is why I'm able to make phone calls on the stock ROM even though data isn't available and yet I see I have 4 bars of signal strength.

Now as for cyanogenmod, the signal strength bars refer to the strength of mobile DATA and that does fluctuate more for me even on the stock ROM however, now with the new display, I just notice it more. I saw that on cyanogenmod after the signal strength for my 4G Lte died, it just switched to 4G(HSPA+) instead with full bars.

Sorry for the confusion.

As for MetroPCS and T-mobile networks, I believe they are both the same now.

 

[RainbouJ]

EDIT: Deleted this post because it was a duplicate post of my last one because I'm on mobile at the moment and misclicked.

 

[Anubis2k3]

Here's a logcat of the random boot I've been experiencing. I don't know if it will be helpful or not, but here it is...

 

[daemon32]

The vibration is unstable and is the cause for most of the issues including random reboots. I've removed it from the next update that Ive been testing before I upload

Here's a logcat of the random boot I've been experiencing. I don't know if it will be helpful or not, but here it is...

Yeah... It doesn't actually reboot, it just realizes that dalvik froze, and the watchdog process kills it, which looks like a reboot, and functions similarly, but it isn't.