When Blake Krone (@blakekrone on twitter) posted on twitter that his Galaxy Tab 10.1 had notified him of an OTA update to ICS (Android OS 4.0), I had to pull my old Tab out of the mothballs and dust bunnies to see if it would do the same. It took a day or two after recharging the battery and turning it on before it notified me of the update, but once it did the download was a piece of cake.
My Galaxy Tab 10.1 now runs ICS!
One of the last things I had done with my Tab was to install MetaGeek’s inSSIDer for Android. My first test of ICS would be firing up inSSIDer and observing all the WiFi wonders … something I don’t get to do with my iPad, thanks to Apple.
First things first … inSSIDer tells me just how quiet the 5GHz spectrum is at my house. In fact, it’s a little two quiet. Where are the two Airport Extreme’s that provide my home (non-lab) WiFi? My Mac is connected to one even, why isn’t inSSIDer seeing them? Thinking maybe it was a problem with inSSIDer, I fired off a few other Wifi apps (Wifi Analyzer and Wolf WiFi Pro), but the results were the same. Somewhere with the process of upgrading to ICS, my Tab had lost it’s 5GHz functionality. Not cool!
A quick Google search revealed I was not alone in my experience. It seems the ICS firmware that gets pushed out in a lot of cases is actually a European build, so the 5GHz bands are disabled by default. The posts that I found offered validation by looking into the file /system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt and look for the ccode entry to be set to GB. Sure enough, there it was.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your rationale), the only way I could see to correct this was to root the tablet and set the file correctly for myself. This is my first attempt at rooting an android device, made slightly more obscure in that all the websites I found with pointers to the process were using Windows, not OSX. In the end, I was successful, and wanted to document what I did.
First, guys at xda-developers are a huge source of knowledge when it comes to Android devices. Most of the work I did actually came from these guys. There was one exception, when it came to the actual root package to install, where the file linked on xda-developers was no longer valid and so I pulled it instead from galaxytabhacks.com.
There were specifically two posts that got me started. “How to Root the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1” set the basic step-by-step procedure for how to accomplish rooting of a basic ICS 4.0 tablet. I’m not looking to add custom ROMs or anything like that … the tablet has already been upgraded to ICS 4.0.4 via the OTA download, I just needed to root the device to edit the one system file. The first article links to downloading the Odin3_v1.85.exe app that will be needed for installing the clockworkmod recovery image. I did have to do this from Windows, but this was easy enough to do within Fusion with my Win7 image. The second post, “flash and root new 4.0.4 ICS stock rom” walks through the specific rooting process. Since the tab already has ICS on it, I skipped the first step that references using Mobile Odin to actually upgrade the tab to ICS.
Once I had clockworkmod recovery installed, I grabbed the rooting file bundle from galaxytabhacks.com (since the update.zip file on xda-developers was no longer a valid link) and completed the process.
With the device rooted, I just needed to grab a decent file manager and make the changes. I had previously grabbed Astro file manager to verify that the nvram_net.txt file was the culprit, but even after rooting the tablet, Astro wouldn’t allow me to edit the file because the /system partition is mounted read only. Instead, I grabbed ES File Explorer from the Play Store, as it provides the needed root support to make the change. I changed the ccode value to ccode=US, rebooted the tab, and now my 5GHz functionality is restored!
Next up … testing with AirMapper now that I have full wireless functionality restored…
Aruba upgraded AOS 6.4.2.3 to GA status today.