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How to Remove Annoying Boot Sound and Built-in Apps on HTC Desire

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This is for GNU/Linux users only.

**Note: you have to take full responsibility what you do here! You should not do anything at all if you do not understand what it does. Never remove any important parts of your system!

Rooting HTC Desire

Download unrevoked^{3} tool from http://unrevoked.com/ and start the tool:

    vk@gary ~2d/unpacked_reflash.tar.gz % ./reflash
    unrEVOked recovery reflash tool
    git version: 8b5c9e4	  

This usually works pretty good. But if you get any problems, read the FAQs or if you face the same problem than I got, read next subsection.

1.1 If you get "Is your firmware too new?"

After two (automatical) reboots of unrevoked, I got «Error: failed to get root. Is your firmware too new?»

Have you installed «Advanced Task Killer»? Then deinstall it. This should be a common cause of the problem.

Further notes about the problem. In my case: «Zysploit» (which is part of unrevoked) gets installed onto SD and not on the internal memory because of my hack from Teamandroid.

So I set it back using adb from the Android SDK to default value in recovery mode (see below):

    vk@gary android-tools % ./adb shell pm setInstallLocation 0	  

Then I re-invoked «reflash» and still got the error. Maybe I need more free space on internal memory. I removed all Adobe Flash updates to free some space and tried again.

The error was gone, «reflash» worked.

I finally was root.

Boot into recovery mode

Removing starting sound

One thing that I hated from the start was this annoying and loud sound my HTC Desire does when booting and showing «quietly brilliant». Not «quiet» and not «brilliant». This is how to get rid of this sound in order to boot really quietly.

Boot into recovery mode as described above.

    vk@gary android-tools % ./adb shell
    ~ # mount /system
    ~ # cd system/customize/resource/
    /system/customize/resource # ls and*
    android_audio.mp3
    /system/customize/resource # mv android_audio.mp3 android_audio.mp3.deactivated
    /system/customize/resource # ls and*
    android_audio.mp3.deactivated
    /system/customize/resource #	  

With renaming (or removing if you like) you can prevent the start sound from being found and used.

Removing built-in apps

Now we will now deactivate this annoying Flickr app:

    /system/customize/resource # cd /system/app/
    /system/app # ls Flick*
    Flickr.apk   Flickr.odex
    /system/app # mv Flickr.apk Flickr.apk.deactivated
    /system/app # mv Flickr.odex Flickr.odex.deactivated
    /system/app # exit
    vk@gary android-tools %	  

Again: if you remove the files, they are gone. But renaming keeps you an open door to revoke your action. The string «deactivated» does not mean anything for Android. This one I made up myself :-)

Rebooting the phone to normal mode:

    vk@gary android-tools % ./adb reboot
    vk@gary android-tools %	  

Have fun with your Desire!

http://karl-voit.at/temp/suderei/2011-06-25_desire_root.png"

Note: this blog entry was originally authored using Serendipity and converted to Org-mode format for publicvoit via a dumb script. This may result in bad format or even lost content. Please write a comment if you want to get in touch with me so that I can try to fix things.

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