Monday, January 7, 2013

Rooting the Asus Transformer (TF101) and test driving Cyanogen Mod

I have for the most part left my ASUS Transformer (TF101) alone, I didn't have any reason to touch it or think of rooting/changing the OS. Recently though, the thing has been a dog... It is loading super slow and there was a whole lot of applications on there that I didn't need a lot of which were loading with the system. So being used to having a rooted phone, I load up ES Task manager and try to use the start up manager program that comes with it (the only half decent one in my opinion).

Hmm... well that won't do. I need to stop all these other apps from loading at start up so I can save some boot time and only use them when needed. So off I went to learn how to do it.

So rather than getting into detail on how to do it, of course XDA has it all laid out with an EXCELLENT program to take all the fear out of rooting your ASUS Transformer. You can find it here: Rooting your ASUS Transformer

Me rooting my ASUS Transformer (TF101):

As I mentioned, I was a bit worried that I would need to do some complicated stuff such as saving some sort of encryption key... or something overly complicated. Normally, I am doing this on my phone where, for the most part, you download some sort of update.zip reboot into recovery and apply it and voila! Rooted phone. This was a slight bit more complicated as it involves actually plugging my tablet into the PC and running some code from there.

But the good thing is, it's not as bad as it sounds. All you really need to do is:

  1. Plug your Transformer into your PC.
  2. Enable USB Debugging on your Transformer.
  3. Wait for all the Windows drivers to load up.
  4. Download the "1-Click Transformer Root" file and extract.
  5. Run "1-Click Transformer Root.bat".
  6. Once rooted run it again.
  7. Select Install CWM recovery.
That's it. Super easy. After that, was able to kill all those nasty start up programs.

Of course, I couldn't just leave it there! I have a rooted tablet now and am a Cyanogen Mod fanboy, I absolutely HAVE to try that out now. And I did.... which will hopefully save you some trouble.

Before I do I have to provide a warning:

BEFORE YOU TRY ANY OTHER ROMS OUT, ENSURE THAT YOU DO A BACKUP VIA NANDROID IN CWM RECOVERY. THOUGH A LOT OF THESE ROMS ARE NICE, THEY ARE MISSING THINGS THAT ONLY THE STOCK ASUS VERSION HAS.

You should be able to do the backup via the Nandroid within the Rogue XM Recovery 1.5.0 that you would install while rooting the device.

Also I want to mention that I don't mean to imply that you CAN'T get the stock ROM back on the device if you don't do the backup. It just introduces a lot more complexity as you have to:
  • Find the stock ROM for your device (there are multiple versions).
  • Install all your programs again.
With the above back up, you are up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Jumping to Jellybean

The first thing that I usually do is jump on the bleeding edge of technology, if I am going to change anything about my tablet it must be to the latest and greatest version of Android. So while poking around I found the Rayman FX ROM: Rayman FX Jellybean ROM for TF101.

I am not going to go into the installation of the ROM as that is pretty straight forward once you have CWM recovery enabled.

Once I was installed (which takes no time) I saw all the buttery goodness of Jelly Bean on my TF101. I was super excited to have the latest and greatest... but found some issues when I tried to do things I normally do with the stock ROM. So to save some time, I will just list the good and the bad below:

THE GOOD:
  • Nice fluid graphics
  • Faster response
  • Cyanogen options
  • The latest and greatest Google OS.

THE BAD:
  • Bluetooth wasn't 100%. I could not, no matter what I did, connect a Levovo Bluetooth mouse. 
  • No ethernet drivers. Probably doesn't matter to a lot of people, but I use a D-Link USB NIC (DUB-E100) that normally works perfectly with the device so I can plug it in via ethernet cable. It did not see the NIC at all.

The above 2 bad points were enough for me to switch back as I need those 2 items to work on my tablet via Citrix, so it was definitely a no go for me. So my next stop is a 'stable' Cyanogen Mod build so I could at least have some of the options you get with Cyanogen.

Jumping back to Cyanogen ICS:

So since I was on the bleeding edge and most likely not on a stable ROM I decided that I would go looking for the latest stable ROM from Cyanogen. You can find them here: Cyanogen Mod Builds for TF101

It didn't take me a total of 5 minutes to load the ROM and find out that the USB NIC did not work in this version either (not sure about Bluetooth, it probably would have worked). So back to square one!

Back to square one:

Since I cannot get everything I need out of the custom ROMS I very quickly did my Nandroid restore and was back with all my apps, most of their data and everything intact in less than 10 minutes... which is really good because I need to do a lot more stuff besides trying to figure out why my NIC or Bluetooth mouse is not working... or writing a blog entry for that matter.

I have a feeling that the vast majority of ROMs out there are not going to support some of the stuff that the stock ROM does, most likely because there is some sort of custom driver for the keyboard that everyone but ASUS has to reverse engineer. So for the forseeable future I will be happy with a rooted TF101 running the stock OS and wait to see if ASUS ever releases a Jelly Bean update for the TF101.

Let me know if you have any suggestions on ROMs that will provide me with everything I have in the stock ROM.... would love to know if I could have Jelly Bean with a working mouse and NIC.