Finally after months of procrastinating, I got down to rooting my Samsung Galaxy Spica and installing custom Froyo on it.
Samsung launched the Spica running on Cupcake, with a promised free upgrade to Eclair when it was released. Then they decided that it was too cheap to be worth spending time putting Froyo in it, and concentrated their efforts on their flagship Galaxy S instead.
Thankfully a healthy community of hackers took the Froyo source code and successfully got it running on the Spica, bundling with it additional features like multitouch [which Samsung did not implement because the Spica apparently could not support it -.-] and 3D drivers, and fixing various bugs like the camera and the youtube audio/video not synchronised.
If one wonders why I used a camera to take photos instead of using a screenshot app, that's because I used a YONIP kernel that uses 24 Bits Per Pixel graphical interface, which produces a brighter and clearer screen but screenshots are not supported. I haven't verify it though. UPDATE: Verified with a random screenshot app that only 16Bpp and 32Bpp are supported.
As an example of the amount of hacking done to make all these happen,
here is a photo. The photo information stated that it was taken with a Samsung SPH-M910. That is because the camera driver [and the 3D driver] was taken from the Samsung Intercept.
With the updated 2D and 3D drivers, games like Slice It!, previously totally unplayable, can be played now. Of course, much cannot be expected from the phone because its a low end model after all; Source Forge 3D crashed, Raging Thunder lagged, and there were rendering problems with Raging Thunder 2.
Stability wise its not at 100% yet; about 90-95% with the occasional unresponsiveness to touching of the screen or the pressing of the button. But otherwise everything works fine.
Speed wise it is definitely much faster now, with the use of Dalvik JIT complier and the ext2 filesystem. But it is still too early to judge because there is much less data in my phone now.
To be taken only with a pinch of salt.
Overall I'm very happy with the performance of Froyo on my Spica; Gingerbread hacking is still ongoing with many features not implemented yet; and I have a feeling Spica is not fully compatible with Gingerbread.
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Just upgraded my Ubuntu to the latest version!
For this new release
Unity became the default desktop environment instead of GNOME as part of merging the netbook edition of Ubuntu into the desktop edition. It is something new, I am not used to it yet, but first impressions are good!
Unlike previous versions where there are two taskbars and another bar for each window opened, making a total of three bars, there is now only a single bar at the top, and that bar will take the functions of whatever window in focus. The icons at the side will be moved off the screen when the focus is on a window instead of the desktop, therefore the window will take up maximum screen space. Quite neat I like.
koped from Wikipedia. For some reason I couldn't take screenshots of this. Basically an Application tray.
UI wise that is all I have for now; any other comments will come as I play around more :)
