[aklug] Re: Towards a more free Android phone

Great tips! My fiances' 15 year old and I want to root his droid x2, and
some of the options involved connecting it to Windows. He'll appreciate
the rom toolkit as well. Thanks, R.

On Mon, 2012-03-19 at 23:57 -0800, Christopher Howard wrote:
> Hey guys, I've mentioned I have a pretty deep distrust for my Android
> phone, between the proprietary software that ships with it and the
> privacy-invading software and Google tie-ins installed. That's pretty
> much still where I am... however, I've learned a few rather
> interesting things looking into the issue. Here's some things I've
> come across so far:
>
> * The official marketplace is, of course, for the most part filled
> with either commerical proprietary software (pay to download) or free
> (as in beer) proprietary software. However, there is a repository of
> free (as in freedom) software available for Android, that is pretty
> easy to use through a package manager app, called F-Droid:
>
> https://f-droid.org/
>
> To use it, download and install Fdroid.apk. However, to do this, you
> must enable "install apps from non-market sources" in your settings,
> or Android will not even allow you to download the file! It may take a
> few minutes to first sync with the repository, but after that it is
> pretty easy and straight forward to use. At present, there are not a
> whole lot of apps (100ish?) but there are some rather useful ones.
>
> * You can root your Android pretty easily with a program called
> Androot. (At least, it was easy on my HTC Hero.) This program installs
> a "su" program on your phone that allows you to grant super user
> privileges to applications that request it. (You must confirm each
> initial request.) This is not the same as a full firmware replacement,
> but it allows you to do a lot of extra things to control your Android
> phone:
>
> http://theunlockr.com/2010/09/27/how-to-root-the-htc-hero-androot-method/
>
> * There is a program in the official market called Rom Toolkit, which
> allows you to do a bunch of interesting things to your phone once you
> grant the app root privileges. Most significant is the ability to
> delete system applications that come pre-installed with the phone,
> that the normal app manager won't allow you to delete. Some of these
> apps are useless garbage that definitely shouldn't be considered
> "system" applications in the first place (e.g., the Facebook app) and
> some of them are questionable apps like the "DRM Data Protection System".
>
> Sadly, the Rom Toolkit itself is proprietary... there doesn't seem to
> be a FOSS equivalent in F-Droid... but at least the locked-down
> version is free.
>
> * In F-Droid, there is a Tor client available called Orbot, which
> provides Tor through a Socks proxy on localhost, plus an accompanying
> browser called Orweb which can route through this proxy, as well as
> provide a number of other useful privacy related services (cookie
> blocking, JavaScript blocking, etc.) I'll admit I've had some issues
> getting the "transparent proxy" part of Orbot to work (i.e.,
> proxifying all network communication automatically) but it seems to
> work fine in regular mode (i.e., Tor/Socks capable apps can use it).
>
> Anyway, I hope somebody else finds that info useful or, at least,
> interesting.
>
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Received on Tue Mar 20 06:07:37 2012