geek

The official Motorola Droid 2.1 update is out. You can get it here: ESD81-from-ESD56.

Word in the DroidMod community is that we’ve rooted it already. I’m sure over the next day or so it’s going to be a whirlwind of forum updates and IRC chat to get this thing to the masses as quickly as possible. But it also doesn’t seem like it is doing anything more than what DroidMod 1.0 has already provided. When I have more details, I’ll pass it along.

I’ve been asked many times how one might get some logging information when doing work on an Android phone. The answer has always been, and always will be “use logcat.” Just to be clear, logcat isn’t just some easy way do something like `cat /var/log/syslog`. It’s actually quite powerful. I always recommend having a terminal open and running logcat whenever you’re doing something on your phone or your emulator. It helps tracking down little nasties, and is a huge help when reporting bugs.

I’d write more on this, but Google has done an excellent job with the documentation. The only thing I would stress is getting very familiar with filtering log output. It will save you a lot of time if you know exactly what you’re looking for. Another tip that’s hidden at the bottom of the documentation is that by default, stdout and stderr are redirected to /dev/null. You can redirect them for visibility in logcat by doing the following:

$ adb shell stop
$ adb shell setprop log.redirect-stdio true
$ adb shell start

You can also set this by default in /data/local.prop.

With the release of the Sholes.info 1.1 ROM for the Droid, there’s been some concern over performance issues as the phone’s uptime increases. It seems one problem is that the browser will continue to chew on memory, and with compcache setup in this ROM, it chews through the swap as well. If you are enjoying the features and functionality of the 1.1 ROM, but would like to disable compcache to help limit the browser’s memory consumption and try to keep your phone alive a bit longer, there is a way to disable it:

[root@droid] / # sysrw && mkdir -p /system/etc/rc.d/ && touch /system/etc/rc.d/disable_15_compcache.sh; sysro; sync

Another tip I’ll throw in as a free bonus is to get SetCPU from the Market. Some people (myself included) have seen problems where the phone takes a while to wake from sleep, or respond to an unlock swipe (getting a phone call makes it near impossible to get it to wake up). Enable profiles in SetCPU and only enable the Sleep profile. Edit it and set the max/min CPU to 250. People have said this seems to work helping get the phone to wake up quickly.

As a head’s up, it seems that people have started picking up the OTA updates. Seems a little early, and no one I know directly has a confirmed update. Then again, we’re running 1.1 and it disables OTA so we can work on it before updating.