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It is Friday July 27, 2012 and I'm going to demo for you in this video a custom ROM for the North American HTC One X called Nocturnal Xi40 version 126.
This is a sense-based ROM, and in this video I'm actually going to go through 3 different parts.
First, I'm actually going to show you the installer, since that's one of the cool features of this ROM, is the different ways that you can tweak it right from the install.
That's why I booted into recovery right here.
Second, I'll actually show some of the features of the ROM, the tweaks that the developer XsMagical has made.
And then finally, and most excitingly, only 2 days ago the source code for the kernel for the North American HTC One X was released by HTC
and I'm going to load on the first custom kernel that has been built that allows us to do some overclocking. So that will be exciting too.
So first of all, to install the ROM I've booted into TeamWin Recovery Project recovery here, which is the recommended recovery for Xi40, and I think the HTC One X in general.
I've downloaded a couple of ROMs, specifically Nocturnal Xi40 version 126. So, let's swipe to install it.
Normally, in old-school installers, it would just unzip something and then reboot. But now Xi40 has incorporated a piece of software called the "Aroma" installer
which gives you some configuration options during the installation.
First we have to accept the licence agreement, which basically says "don't steal my work", change log, and we're going to choose a "Custom" install.
We have the option to wipe or no wipe. If you're coming from another ROM you always want to do a wipe, and probably a backup before ;)
This will leave the SDCard contents intact, however, but you'll lose any app data.
So here is where the customization comes in. First of all, you need to select the carrier that you're using.
The only difference that makes is it will install the APN and some other carrier-specific settings. I'm on Rogers in Canada so I've selected "Rogers".
Next you can choose a couple apps that you would like to have installed. I'm going to leave "Titanium Backup" checkmarked.
Don't want "ES File Launcher"... I'll take "Solid Explorer" instead. We'll include "Wi-Fi Tether" and "Google Now".
The second section is which apps you would like to remove. So these are apps that are included by default but you have the option here to remove them,
things GMail, Google Voice, Google Maps, and so on. I'm going to leave everything in except for Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Visual Voice Mail,
and the Jelly Bean Keyboard because we will be using the HTC keyboard.
Next you have the section to remove some HTC-specific apps. I'm going to leave all of these in, stuff like Locations, Notes, Mail, Movie Editor, and Weather.
Here is where you can install some of the mods for Xi40.
The first is the "Rosie Grid Size". So this is the drawer size on the home screen when you browse through the apps. So the default is 4x5. We're going to change that to 5x6.
You can also choose which launcher you'd like to use: Apex or Miui is available as well.
You can completely "desense" your ROM with Xi40. We're going to actually leave it in there so we can show off some of the features.
Although on my devices I usually use Apex Launcher. You do need to make sure that you choose at least one.
Here's you're able to undo the key remap, which we'll talk about later, if you don't like it.
Here you can choose the multitasking overriding. Stock HTC software doesn't do multitasking very well.
So we're going to choose "v2 multitasking" and the option to enable overclock, although with our custom kernel we'll be able to do that much better.
And finally, you can choose a boot animation. I'm going to choose the "Jelly Bean" boot animation. Then you swipe and click next, next.
And away you go. So this will format your system, data, cache, and dalvik-cache partitions and install the necessary files,
along with the tweaks and customizations that were chosen in the Aroma installer.
So, I'll come back once this is complete and we'll boot into our brand new ROM that's been installed.
So, here we are. Right now it looks more-or-less like the stock HTC software, but we'll see very shortly that there are a bunch of nice features in it.
Before we go too much further, let me just show you the versions of everything that's installed.
So you can see Android version 4.0.3, and kernel 3.0.8, baseband 0.18,
Here's Xi40 running live.
So the first feature is something called the "Quick Settings". So you're used to swiping down from the top and seeing the notification bar.
But now at the bottom there is this option called "Quick Settings" and if you click on that it gives you a bunch of quick ways to adjust common features of your device.
So brightness, for example, we can slide the brightness (leave that down at the minimum). You can adjust the volumes.
Silent mode, vibrate, turn the radios on and off, activate hotspot, turn on the flashlight (which just turns on the LED),
auto-rotation, wireless adb (which is useful if you're doing development), shows the total memory, and then, of course, you can go into the settings.
So that's kind of a cool feature.
Next, something that is becoming very common in custom ROMS, is the button remap.
On stock devices you get a back button, home button, and the recent tasks button. There's no menu button anymore in Ice Cream Sandwich, as recommended by Google.
So what happens is that sometimes you end up with the menu button here, sometimes here, and in old apps it goes all the way across the bottom.
So not a very consistent experience. So what is very common, and what is done in Xi40, is the recent tasks button has actually been re-mapped to bring up the menu.
So if we go into whatever application...
You can see it's bringing up the menu. Consistent. I really like it.
If you do want the recent apps you just press-and-hold, and there you go.
Pressing and holding the home key brings up Google Voice
And pressing and holding the back key will actually kill the foreground application, as opposed to just closing it.
So that is what is commonly referred to as the "button remap".
The next feature is the Advanced Power Menu. So if you press and hold the power key it brings up this menu here which has more options than it does in the stock ROM.
You have the option to power off, restart, you can also take a screenshot,
which will save on your SDCard, airplane mode, turn on or off the mobile network, and also put your device into vibrate mode or silent.
Furthermore, if you choose "Restart" you have a few different options. You can do a full reboot, a hot reboot,
which starts the reboot right after the bootloader so if you don't need to get into the bootloader it saves you a few seconds,
you can boot into recovery, or explicitly boot into the booloader. Booting into recovery is very handy if you're flashing a ROM.
The camera, one of the coolest feature of the HTC One X, is the stock camera. So it has all of the features that you'd expect from the stock camera.
And finally, there is a special application on here... oh, and I should mention too, this is obviously rooted.
Here's SuperSU available right here. Very uncommon that you find a ROM that is not rooted.
And you'll also notice actually, since we're in here, the size of this grid is 5x6, and that is the size that we selected in the Aroma installer.
The default is 4x5 I believe. So this way all the icons fit onto 2 screens. I think it looks just fine and I prefer it to the stock look-and-feel.
So there's an application that comes installed on here called "Nocturnal Tweaks" and this opens up a whole bunch of other additional tweaks.
This is the ported version of the "CoreDroid Tweaks" for the HTC One X. So I'll show you some of the features that are available in here.
There are some power saver options, which I guess are hidden from stock. I've never messed around with these.
Some extra information about your phone.
You can change the lock screen. So by default we get the HTC lock screen that has the ring at the bottom. You have to swipe it up to unlock.
You can use the AOSP (the "Android Open Source Project") lock screen. There's a workaround because when you get incoming calls you have to unlock.
And I'm not sure what "Disable Lock Animation" is, but let's turn that on as well.
You can change the text that shows up on the lock screen, but I think this is only for the Sense version.
So this may not show up on the AOSP lock screen. And a few other options.
For Sense, transparent nav bar, landscape sense, which is actually something I can show you now.
So by default your home screen is always in portrait mode, however,
with Xi40 it can go into landscape mode. So, kind of cool.
So let's go back to the Nocturnal Tweaks.
You can turn off landscape sense. Loop allows you to continuously swipe through the home screen and when it gets to the end it will loop back to the other side.
And a few other options.
Advanced power menu. So, if you remember, when you press and hold the power key. From here you're allowed to control which options are available in there.
So we can, say, turn off screenshot, airplane mode, and the sound option.
And now you'll see that the advanced power menu is a little smaller.
And there are other tweaks. The recent apps style. This is the Sense recent applications style, where you swipe horizontally.
But you can change it to use the AOSP task switcher.
And there are a few other options in there. I usually set the volume steps so that it's a little finer-grained control when you change the volume.
The task bar, so clock options. So if you look at the clock up here you can move it into the middle. And there it's moved.
There are a few other options there. And also the battery. So you can put the battery text up in the top.
And a few other various settings.
MiUi customizations have also been ported. Personally, I don't really like them but they're very popular and they do look pretty good.
So there's support for that in this ROM as well.
You can also remap the capacitive LED keys. I just leave them the way they are because I like it but you can go in here and change that as well.
Additionally the CoreDroid has a bunch of theme support. So you can change the font on the device.
You can use different clocks.
There are different skins you can choose from, different logos for the WiFi.
Different logos for the signal indicator, the battery, the keyboard, and what not.
I usually just leave this alone. I'm not much of a skin guy. But I do like changing the font.
But I'm going to leave that alone now because if I change the font it's going to reboot the device on me, which I'm not interested in right now.
Okay, so now we get to the third part of the video where we're going to load a custom kernel and overclock our CPU.
Like I mentioned before, the source code for the North American HTC One X was just released 2 days ago by HTC
and within hours there was a custom kernel up on xda-developers.com.
I'm going to load a kernel on called Blackout BeastMode version 1.1, which will allow us to overclock the CPU.
In order to play around with that, though, we're first going to need to install a couple of applications.
I've just installed two apps: one called "Voltage Control" and one called "CPU Spy".
So if we launch CPU Spy you can see that the maximum CPU frequency is 1512 MHz and the minimum is 384 MHz.
The horizontal bar is a representation of how often that particular CPU frequency is used.
There's always a tradeoff between speed and battery life. The governor tries to keep it at a reasonable balance.
If we go into Voltage Control (these are both apps from the Google Play Store, by the way and for Voltage Control your phone needs to be rooted)
this allows you to change some of the frequencies. So the first is the maximum frequency. So lowering that will increase battery life at the cost of performance.
And the other one is the minimum CPU frequency. Raising that will improve the performance at the cost of battery life.
You can also change the I/O schedulers. So there are 3 to choose from here.
And there are the CPU governors to choose from. And there are 1, 2, 3, 4 to choose from here.
So the governor is what chooses which CPU [frequency] to use. So you can choose "powersave", will prefer a lower frequency,
and "performance" obviously will choose a higher frequency.
So now I've downloaded the Blackout BeastMode 1.1 kernel. So we need to reboot into recovery in order to install it.
So I'm going to choose Restart, and then Recovery, and we'll come back once we're booted up.
Ok. So here we are in recovery. So I'm going to choose "Install" and Blackout BeastMode is here.
Swipe to install...
Doesn't take too long. And we're done.
There's actually a 2-part install for this one. The first is installing a zip file
and second we need to install boot.img using "flashboot" from the PC.
So I'm going to reboot into the bootloader and from here you'll notice that it says "fastboot" here at the top.
When I plug in a USB cable the "fastboot" should change to "fastboot USB".
There it is. And now I can run "fastboot" from my PC to install the boot image.
And it's done!
So now we can reboot the device.
Ok. So here we are booted up again.
And you'll notice, first of all, this is the AOSP lock screen. It still has a ring but it's a different ring to unlock.
So this is not the HTC Sense lock screen.
Ok. So now let's bring up Voltage Control again.
And you'll notice down here that the slider's maximum and minimum values have changed.
So we can now, although 1512 MHz was the maximum before, now we can slide it all the way to 2106 MHz.
And the minimum we can also drop down another level
to 192 MHz, although it can be a little problematic at that level, so I'm just going to leave it at 384.
And that's done.
So let's do something that will cause a little bit of CPU usage. You know, swipe around a bit and what not.
Now let's go back into CPU Spy
Now we can see that we've already starting using the 2106 MHz.
You'll notice 1512 is kind of heavy because that's what we were using until we loaded the custom kernel
and now 2106 is the maximum and we should see a little bit better performance.
And also, it did use a little bit of 192 before we had switched to it. So very cool.
And finally, if we go into Voltage Control again the I/O schedulers, you'll notice that there were only 3 before.
There are 3 additional ones now: "sio" is the default, "noop" and "vr" are also popular options.
I'm not going to say that I understand what the difference is :)
And the CPU governor, there are 2 more options there as well: "userspace" and "interactive" I think are the two additional ones that were added by the developer.
So let's go into Settings, and I'll just show you the "About" screen for your information.
And you can see the kernel version there. I guess that doesn't show up very well in the video.
But it says it's the BeastMode 1.1 kernel.
So anyways, this has been a demo of Nocturnal Xi40 r126 ROM.
Many, many thanks to user XsMagical on the xda-developers.com forums for providing and maintaining this ROM for us.
And also tonnes of thanks to user sbryan12144 on the xda-developers.com forums for providing the Blackout BeastMode kernel.
I've provided links in the description of this video to all the software demoed here.
Please leave your comments if you have any interest in discussing this.
Or even better, go to xda-developers.com and join the forum.
Good luck and I hope you load this ROM on your device!