

CyanogenMod 10.0 Release - rbanffy
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/cyanogenmod-10-0-release

======
lini
The problem with the CM project is most of the devices it tries to support are
not open source. What I mean is that the drivers for the radio, GPU, audio,
etc. chips are not available in source form like Android itself (via AOSP). In
order to compile a ROM for any device, the developers have to rely on binary
blobs ripped from an official update or a different device. Unfortunately,
that means bad support for devices that don't get updates by their
manufacturer.

Case in point - Samsung Galaxy S2. The S2 had an official ICS ROM release by
Samsung and devs managed to get a stable build of CM9 running on it. However,
as of now there is no official JB update for the S2 and CM 10 is far from
stable on that device. There are problems with the Yamaha sound chip (low
volume), problems with the graphics chip (Hardware Composer), USB, TV-out,
etc.

I am really hopeful about the new Nexus devices though. The Nexus 10 is the
most OSS friendly Android device I've seen - everything except the GPU driver
is available as open source.

~~~
malnourish
I have CM10 running on my Galaxy S2 Epic 4g touch just fine. No stability
issues whatsoever. Only problem is it can't ever find GPS.

~~~
lini
There is a list of known issues with the latest nightlies[1]. I was talking
about the international version of S2 (i9100), because that is what I tried
CM10 on a few weeks ago.

[1][http://teamhacksung.org/wiki/index.php/CyanogenMod10:GT-I910...](http://teamhacksung.org/wiki/index.php/CyanogenMod10:GT-I9100:Nightly:Known_issues)

~~~
voltagex_
Email Samsung and ask when they're releasing the platform documentation. It's
really the only thing you can do, and it sucks.

------
tworats
A few months ago I was about to get rid of my quite old Galaxy Vibrant, so
with nothing to lose I installed CyanogenMod on it. It's worked so well I'm
keeping it as my main phone for now - it's clean, stable, and looks much nicer
than the Samsung ROM. The only downside is significantly reduced battery life,
but I can live with that for now.

Will definitely be trying CM10 if it's supported for the Vibrant.

~~~
dguaraglia
Try using BetterBatteryStats to find what application are causing the most
'partial wakelocks'. Once I cleaned those up and moved the default scheduler
from 'interactive' to 'ondemand', my battery life went up _a lot_. Even
better, if you can get a third party kernel supporting the 'badass' or
'smartass2' schedulers, you'll get even better battery life.

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omnisci
I'm assuming people here know a bit more about this than I do, so I'll ask.
Why is CM still a 3rd party developer? I'm curious as to why
Google/Samsung/Motorola etc hasn't bought them out and applied their talent to
make the stock setup better? Honestly, I'd much rather buy a "XYZ phone,
CyanogenMod version" over to the stock Touchwiz/SenseUI etc front end. Excuse
my ignorance if this is a dumb question.

~~~
bullwinkle12
Not a dumb question. Samsung hired, Steve Kondik, CM's lead developer in 2011.
I'm not sure I've seen how this has affected Samsung, but I haven't really
paid to much attention to their newer phones. Still, we won't ever see a CM
phone by Samsung. Although I agree, that it would be preferred to any TouchWiz
phone. [http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/15/samsung-hires-
cyanogenmod...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/15/samsung-hires-cyanogenmod-
founder-steve-kondik/)

~~~
omnisci
Just a FYI, I had a SG3 for 3 weeks and I recently got the note 2 and I have
no complaints. A lot of the tweaks they implemented are pretty f'in awesome
and I find myself saying "that makes sense" quite often, so maybe hiring this
guy helped.

Thanks for the answers and I'm happy to see that samsung did that. I know for
a fact, that if I was a company and someone was making MY product
better....for free, that I'd be offering them a job. That is the kind of
employee I want in house, self motivated and creative.

~~~
bullwinkle12
Great point. That's exactly the kind of employee all companies should aim to
hire - someone who is genuinely excited and passionate.

------
yason
I can't wait till we get to the point where you can pretty much buy any phone,
download your favorite Linux/Android distribution, hit install and watch it
come alive.

Phones are computers these days. And this is how we deal with computers,
right? We keep installing Ubuntus, Fedoras, Windows, even OS X on any x86 box.
We've got decades of experience of doing that.

The current phone market resembles the 80's home computer market: there were
dozens if not hundreds different computers that were incompatible with each
other. In the 90's the PC architecture had won and Linux started to be usable
with the most basic components. In the 00's it became commonplace to be able
to install Linux on nearly any computer you could buy off the shelf and expect
99% of things to work out of the box.

It would take till 2040 to reach this on phones if it took the same time.
However, given the faster development and evolution of the phone ecosystems I
would expect that we'll hit that target in 2020's or so. By then, the
cpu+gpu+modem variations have converged to a few well-known architectures for
which open source drivers are available. They might be slower or consume a
little more power than the original drivers but nevertheless at least you can
boot your phone with your own software that you downloaded somewhere.

~~~
zanny
We aren't even there yet on the desktop, plenty of printers, pci cards, etc
are still undocumented Windows blobs.

It is this strange belief on the part of hardware makers that making the lives
of FOSS developers harder makes them more money or something. Because they
already wrote the docs - they have engineers that made the stuff. They just
don't put them on pastebin or something.

------
mindslight
It really irks me that there are no builds for older devices. What is the
point of installing CM and putting up with reduced and clunky functionality,
just to be left by the wayside for updates? I don't know if this is due to CM
or Google itself running amok on the upstream tree, but a philosophy that
considers a two year old device obsolete is utterly preposterous.

~~~
dsr_
Unofficial ports will happen. CM can only fully support devices where there is
at least one developer who owns the device and is willing to do the work. All
their work is in the open. Just the same as any other open source project: if
you want it, you need to do some work or pay someone to do it for you.

~~~
mindslight
Eh? The device _was_ supported at one time.

Ubuntu doesn't say "too bad, we no longer own any six year old Thinkpad T60's"
when they release a new version. They simply _leave_ the drivers for such
devices, make changes that aren't expected to break specific hardware models,
and get some stablish prereleases so they can take the occasional bug report
for the leaky abstractions that did break.

Contrast to Google who AFAIK throws globs of code over the wall with all of
the support for older devices ripped out. And then CM presumably uses that
tree as a starting point to make changes, instead of merging into a master CM
tree.

CM might just be doing the best they can to cope with Google's broken process,
but the whole philosophy of brittle trees tailored for specific devices is the
philosophy of _embedded development_ , not _open source_. So CM comes off as
aiming to be the latest eye candy fluff mod for tinkerers, rather than a solid
computing base for your phone.

~~~
rbanffy
> Ubuntu doesn't say "too bad, we no longer own any six year old Thinkpad
> T60's" when they release a new version.

It's not a huge problem because new x86-based computers still have to run
Windows XP (they can probably run MS-DOS too) and, therefore, cannot be that
much different from the six year old Thhinkpad of your example.

~~~
mindslight
But we're talking about source compatibility, not binary compatibility. So
getting around the quirks of the old devices is an already solved problem,
even if it needs to be #ifdef'd out for the newer devices. The problem isn't
technical, it's a philosophy that treats every device as an opaque special
case, rather than factoring out the common parts and abstracting out the
differences. Of course the incidental complexity continues to pile up.

I've got 18 years of experience running Linux, compiling my own kernel and
packages on a Slackware base up until 2002 or so. In that time I also did
embedded design and development for about five years, using cp/zip/email as
the ultimate revision control. I know the two philosophies pretty damn well,
and I'm unequivocally stating that Android and CM are being run as embedded
development projects, where code flexibility and maintainability take a back
seat to just making working blobs for specific device configurations. This is
ridiculous for what purports to be an open source OS running on a computer
roughly equivalent to a desktop PC circa 2000.

But alas, I'm being downvoted into oblivion by non-technical fanboys who
probably think that flashing a phone is a highly technical activity, rather
than just annoyance due to manufacturer obfuscation (this isn't you - which is
why I'm replying to your comment. it's general frustration with the non-
thinking HN masses these days). The incidental complexity from the non-
scalable development philosophy has built up so much that most people are
incapable of even seeing my simple point.

So then, I'm out. I'll keep dreaming of being in a place where I'd have the
time to dedicate to making an actual open source user-centric mobile OS to run
on mass market hardware. Android will make a great Windows XP.

~~~
CJefferson
No, sorry. You are wrong.

Every phone is a horrible special case, and those #ifdefs do not simply map
forward from one version of the OS to another, unlike on a PC where a single
set of drivers will get most computers to a basic working state.

More importantly, how do you suggest they debug? When a phone OS is
incorrectly configured, the most likely behaviour is simply hanging with a
black screen. Distributing such releases would be worse than useless. If you
want to put in the work to make CM work on your device, there are plenty of
people who would help you.

------
pkulak
That's really nice, but I don't think I'll be touching anything until this
page is completed:

[http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III_(Veriz...](http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III_\(Verizon\))

It just freaks me out to follow directions found on some random forum.

~~~
moheeb
My whole career has been based on following directions found on some random
forum.

~~~
skeletonjelly
The start of my career was based on following directions on some forum until
"Never mind, fixed it!" half the time.

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hollerith
My Nexus 7 updated itself to 4.2 yesterday. Am I correct in assuming that
since it is based on 4.1, if I install CM 10.0, I will lose most of the
improvements in the 4.2 update?

One improvement I really appreciate is an improvement in the dynamics of
scrolling among the five screens or parts of the launcher / home screen.

~~~
sandyarmstrong
Yes. You should wait for CM 10.1 if you want Android 4.2.

Personally, I only use Cyanogen as a last resort on phones that no longer
receive updates or that have poor stock ROMs (Samsung Captivate, for example).
I have no desire to install CM on my perfectly functional and supported Nexus
7.

------
Nursie
Cool. May even make the switch before long as I am _still_ waiting for Samsung
to release JB on the Galaxy Note.

~~~
EnderMB
Given Samsung's past in providing updates for phones you may be waiting for a
long time.

~~~
fpgeek
It depends. Samsung has promised a pretty big Jelly Bean rollout: SGS3, SGS2,
Note, tablets and even some phones going directly from Gingerbread to Jelly
Bean without stopping at ICS (e.g. Galaxy Beam).

If they keep those promises (and that's a big if, of course), they'd be one of
the better manufacturers. In particular, I think they'd be the only
manufacturer taking some 2011 devices all the way from Gingerbread to Jelly
Bean.

Personally, I expect at least the SGS2 and the Note because those devices have
gotten new life with their LTE versions, but we'll see.

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lewispollard
Still nothing stable for the intl i9300 :(

~~~
chrismsnz
Yeah, I'm disappointed with that. I bought the phone because it was popular
and I was sure it was going to have support. Guess I was wrong.

Always buy a nexus!

~~~
fpgeek
I'm a bit surprised that CM10 isn't more stable on the international SGS3. The
official update has started and the associated kernel source is out. Those are
usually the two big roadblocks.

~~~
lewispollard
I'm using a nightly that's reasonably stable but occasionally freezes the
browser when typing in input boxes

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ergergregg
Don't care, I have a Nexus4 being delivered and won't ever have to install
Cyanogen again! (I know its a little bit different but still I won't bother).

~~~
kinleyd
cm > stock android, that's been my experience. When I got my Galaxy Nexus, I
was on cm within 2 weeks.

~~~
omnisci
I have to agree. I had CM7 on my atrix and it saved my phone. I was this close
"_" to getting rid of my phone because I was frustrated with the stock OS. CM7
fixed that, and gave my phone the last few months I needed out of it.

I just got the note 2 (which is dead sexy btw), and I"m going to hold off on
custom roms until I get annoyed with the stock setup(ie, 2 weeks:) ). Happy to
see that CM10 is kicking ass.

