Install Polaris Office of Galaxy S2 on Galaxy SL i9003

Polaris office is one of the office suite for mobile, similar to the many available for mobile phones. Galaxy SL comes with think free office, which is also good, but formatting, editing are much better in Polaris office. 

You need to have root for installing this application, as it needs to be installed in system folders. I have referred to this post of xda for installation and also downloaded from the link provided there.

Here is the procedure to follow to install the same

1. Extract the files from compressed file

2. Copy apk from app to /system/app

3. Copy files from lib folder to /system/lib

You may have to free some space in /system folder as that partition is of limited size, and you may need to delete unwanted applications and may be you can delete the think free application.

Update i9003 with Galaxy S-II Dock Icons

Bored of the same dock bar at the home screen, and you think the Galaxy S-II one looks much better. Its not difficult to update it to that. All that you need it root permissions.

I could not get this full information in one place on net, so if you are reading my blog you are lucky to have all the information in one place. You do not need to install a custom TouchWiz, you can modify what you have right now. I am running TouchWiz 4.0 for your information. (Galaxy SL - Gingerbread 2.3.4 XXKPH) 

First have copy Contact.apk, Email.apk, Mms.apk and TouchWiz30Launcher.apk & DialerTabActivity from system/app to PC, then Open it with any tools such as Winrar or 7Zip, do not extract.

check the icons in the path - res/drawable-hdbi.

-Contakt.apk: ic_launcher_contacts.png

-DialerTabActivity - ic_launcher_phone.png

-Mms.apk: ic_launcher_smsmms.png

-Email.apk: icon.png

-TouchWiz30Launcher.apk: mainmenu_icon_application.png and mainmenu_icon_home.png.

Replace all these icons with new Icons and drag and drop into the 7Zip explorer.

Copy the .apk fils back to system/app and restart the launcher or the phone.

It should look something like this, after you have updated everything that is mentioned here.

That goes with many stock apps. I hope its useful.

The Samsung Galaxy S-II icons can be downloaded from here.

http://www.multiupload.com/M37PRRW18J. More info can be found here

Customize Icon Tiles for Galaxy SL i9003

As I had mentioned in the previous post about the TouchWiz 4.0, the icon backdrops/tiles are not set as it should be. I mean to say, even though in the apk, all of the tiles have been named as to which icon it should be applied, they are not been applied to them. My belief is that it must be because of the mismatch of the binary and the TouchWiz 4.0 apk, but I am not sure. I need some expert to comment here.

I have referred to this post, and worked my way, it was mean for touchwiz 3.0 for getting rid of the icon tiles by replacing them with transparent ones. I have followed the same procedure and replaced the unwanted tiles with the one I want to have.

All you need to have is a rooted phone, because for replacing touch wiz files you need to have root permissions. You also need to have ADB and Tool like Winrar or 7Zip. I use 7zip.

First take out the TouchWiz30Laucnher.apk file located in the '/system/app' folder and put on your desktop or somewhere. Use the below command. 

adb pull /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk <local_path>

Now you can open this apk file in 7Zip, do not extract, but replace the tiles you want by directly dragging and dropping in to the 7Zip window. The tiles would be located at '/res/drawable-hdpi-v4/' or similar folder, use your common sense, they would start with something like 'mainmenu or homescreen' and end with '_bg.png'

Once you are done replace this apk with the original apk present in the '/system/app/' folder. remember to keep a copy in case if you have done something wrong.

In the windows command prompt, use adb push to push the apk into SD Card.

> adb push <local_path>\TouchWiz30Launcher.apk /sdcard/
> adb shell
$ su
# mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# mv /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk.bak
# cp /sdcard/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk
# chmod 744 TouchWiz30Launcher.apk
# mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# exit
$ exit
> exit

What I have done here its, first pushed the apk to sdcard, opened the adb shell, logged in as root, mounted the system partition as read/write, renamed the original file to keep a backup and then copied the new file from sd card to the original file's path, them changed the permissions as needed, and remounted the file system as read only and then exited.

I will update a screen shot, to show that all of market applications which use to use some crap icon tiles now use the system icon tiles and the UI looks pretty good, and I feel its much much better than before. Only problem is that the way it chooses background is still random, and every time you restart the icon tiles would change. :) 

Install Busybox on Samsung i9003 Galaxy SL

First of all let me tell me if busy box is needed for you. Mostly it is needed because the adb shell does not have most of the commands supported such cp (copy), and it makes it difficult when you want to modify something (if you have rooted already) difficult because of unavailability of the commands support. So it is preferred to have Busy box, which has most of the command support, and if you had worked in Linux you would know what is busy box for.

Usually, you need to copy the busy box binary on to whichever folder you need, with the help of any command line tool, then say busybox --install, it should setup the links for all the commands and should work for you. And you may need to add that path into you PATH variable. Somehow after long search, I could not find any such thing working for me. 

But now that this application names 'busybox installer' does exactly the same, and it needs root permissions (to make it install in /system/xbin/ ) and you have the option to install any version of busybox you wish to.

So my search ends here (somehow I had seen this before, and dint want to do it this way, wanted to do it manually). One you have installed it, it will automatically restart your phone. Now you have all the comands available on your phone when connected to adb. Some commands may still be taken from old toolbox, and if you specifically need busy box one, you can override it by typing busybox before it. 

Samsung Touch Wiz 4.0 Look and Feel

This post is dedicated for showing the Look and Feel of Touch Wiz 4.0 Running on Galaxy SL (i9003). If you follow my previous post, absolutely there are no bugs, no lags, and only excitement !!

Here are few screen captures for showing all the features

 Fig 1: Picture showing home screen, if you observe, you can add as many icons as you want in the dock below. And the look and feel of home icon is updated.

Fig 2 : Picture showing the app drawer, you can see that instead of black now you have the transparent screen, and icon tiles have been removed, in fact you have option to enable or disable the same

 Fig 3 : Home screen widgets are more standardized and looks more like Galaxy S-II, I usually don't like widgets and only widget I use is weather bug.

Fig 4: Wallpaper options are more neat and clean, and it looks much better as show above.

Fig 5 : App drawer editing is also improved and you can specify the number of columns and rows and also the number of icons. The best part is if some one likes to have folders then that option is also allowed. There is unofficial version named as Touch WIz 4.5 also available in XDA which seems to be modified a lot, and so, I do not recommend, but it does have lot of other enhancements.

The icon tiles can be enabled to have backdrops for each icon, but it seems to be randomly picking the tiles from somewhere. I myself have opened the apk file in 7zip and see that most of the apps have well defined backdrops/tiles, but the TouchWiz 4.0 is messing up with it, and seems to be mismatch when it picks the icon tiles, so you may not be very impressed with icon tiles, you may have to live with it. I absolutely have no idea how they are picking the icon tiles at this point, if someone knows and why it behaves like this please do let me know.