Deperately seeking minimal gingerbread rom for kids please

[Guest thisweb]

Hi, I wonder if anyone here knows of or could strip down a ROM for basic internet/app usage. I recently upgraded my phone to a glaxy I am after a minimal gingerbread rom for my pulse so my kids can play with it. I just want a ROM that has wifi and allows me to install Google Play apps/games only. I do not require 3g/phone/messaging/camera or any other services that arn't vital for the rom to install games. Overclock and HW acceleration would be good (so I guess CM based?). If anyone is able to do this I would be so grateful. Currently the CM6.1 rom I use is just to slow and buggy. I figured if I could get a ROM without all the unused bits it would be faster/have more memory available? Would it help? Is this even possible? Would anyone else find this useful? I still think theres life in my pulse yet.

[Guest twrock]

Hi, I wonder if anyone here knows of or could strip down a ROM for basic internet/app usage. I recently upgraded my phone to a glaxy I am after a minimal gingerbread rom for my pulse so my kids can play with it. I just want a ROM that has wifi and allows me to install Google Play apps/games only. I do not require 3g/phone/messaging/camera or any other services that arn't vital for the rom to install games. Overclock and HW acceleration would be good (so I guess CM based?). If anyone is able to do this I would be so grateful. Currently the CM6.1 rom I use is just to slow and buggy. I figured if I could get a ROM without all the unused bits it would be faster/have more memory available? Would it help? Is this even possible? Would anyone else find this useful? I still think theres life in my pulse yet.

Well since no one else has offered any thoughts, I will.

I don't know if you are "committed" to Gingerbread. I don't know why you would require that rom if your goal was to have a smaller footprint and quicker rom. My experience with Gingerbread/CM7 is that it is larger and slower and burns through the battery faster than the CM6 rom I am using (Styx, to be precise).

Here are a few other thoughts for you to consider.

The single biggest limiting factor is Pulse's lack of ram. That isn't going to change; it's set.

The size of your /system and /data partitions is set by the official Huawei rom you choose to update to. IIRC, the smallest /system partition is achieved by flashing the 2011 UK update. That will give you the largest amount of space left over for installing other apps/games/etc. However, if are using a rom that supports apps2sd, then the space for installing apps can become very large (not limitless, but much larger). If you are thinking about installing popular games, you are probably going to run out of space fairly quickly, thus apps2sd becomes important. Incidentally, the built-in Froyo apps to sd is much less efficient than using DT A2SD. You will want to also move the cache to SD. (See the second post in the older TXG thread for more detailed explanation of this stuff: http://www.modaco.com/topic/349454-rom-txg-cm61-mod-updated-2012-02-02/#entry1860003.)

If you want to know if you can safely remove an APK file from a CM rom, you can do two things. First, look at this link: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Barebones. Secondly, you can flash the rom as-is, and install an app like EasyFreezy and start freezing apps to see if it causes any trouble. If it causes no trouble, you might be able to remove it from the rom entirely. However, unless you are going to use the space in /system to pre-install other apps, removing even more apps from /system is not really helping you much (vs. just freezing them). You'll just end up with empty space for all your effort.

I think it would be very easy to reduce the size of a rom like Styx to make it fit in the official 2011 UK update /system partition size. (I think it is close already.) Since you don't want apps like Gmail and Email, etc., it should be simple to just delete those APK's. Use the barebones list above to make your choices. Deleting those apps is as easy as extracting the rom's zip file, deleting whichever /system/app/*.apk you want to, and then re-zipping the rom files. Make sure you keep all the directory structure intact.

Good luck.

[Guest thisweb]

Thanks TWrock. That is useful advise. May try the barebones thing. The only reason I wanted Gingerbread is that some apps aren't available for lower versions of android. Or at least they don't appear to be in Market. This could be to do with the phones fingerprint file but I never worked out a way to trick market to assume my phone is better than it is (if an app doesn't work I don't care, I can just delete it, but I'd like the option to try it) I've managed to install 'incompatible apps' by manually downloading from erm.. helpful sites. Google market is very restrictive on this, its very annoying not to at least have the option to just install anyway (it could still warn first, very few apps would break phone functionality). For example I would like to install cupcake dash. Its a fairly basic toddlers game, no fancy graphics, may run a little slow. Anyway,do you know if there a way to trick market to think my phone is say a galaxy s2? then i can use froyo rom.