Custom ROM on LG Optimus 2x

Some rights reserved by Johan Larsson

Ever since I started using LG Optimus 2X P990, i noticed some or the other issue with its Battery. The OS was as well not upgradable as it supported updates only to Android 2.3. I tried almost all battery saving apps from the App store. Well, battery was not the only problem, the phone used to freeze after sometime after using it. After browsing a lot through the XDA Developers forum i found that the default firmware provided by LG wasn't good enough for the hardware. Only a new custom ROM would help. There were numerous mentions on CynogenMod being the best of all. However getting a custom ROM was not a one click solution.
Here are some steps how you could get your own custom ROM on LG Optimus 2X although these are common for most of the phones.

1. Install LG Optimus P990 USB driver on your windows PC
2. Experts suggest that your phone should have a good battery life before going ahead with this as it take time for the installation to finish.
3. You will first need to root your phone before going ahead with Custom ROM. I used OneClick root software. It took a while, but did the job.
4. Install Titanium Backup to backup all your apps and other data
5. Enable USB debugging mode from settings
6. To back up your contacts you can use www.phonecopy.com
7. Download any version of you choice form Cyanogens' website. I chose a stable one, although you can go for any of the nightly release too.
8. Install Clock work mode recovery software on your phone.
9. Copy the Cynogenmod zip to your SD CARD
10. Power off the phone
11. Restart the phone by pressing the start button and holding the Volume button down.
12. You will be in Clock Work Recovery mode screen
13. Click on Wipe data
14. Click on Wipe Cache
15. Click on Install Zip from sdcard
16. Select the zip and wait for the installation to finish
17. After the installation restart you phone to find the new ROM installed.
18. You may find that Google Apps are missing here. You can look for CyanogenMod gapps and install them using Steps 11, 12, 15, 16 above.
19. Restart the phone and you can see google apps as well.

There are many other custom ROMs available. Some famous ones are CynogenMod, Paranoid, AOKP, Liquid Smooth etc.

New Relic

I received a mail some months ago to register to New Relic, they had some cool offers then like free t-shirts etc. I didn't check it then as i was really busy with other stuff. However since my new DevOps learning experience and course material had mentions of monitoring tools, after googling a bit i came across New Relic too.

So New Relic is a software analytics company. It delivers a Saas)Software as a service) model, that monitors Web and Mobile application real-time. Monitoring using New Relic seemed easy as i tried it on one or two systems and the logs generated looked really accurate and helpful too.

While there are may other useful ways as well for any organization for monitoring using New Relic, i only tried it for a systems performance. You can monitor your app, by simply supplying a a config file to the project directory and compiling and deploying the project. New Relic will provide real-time updates of the resources used by the app. You can add many plugins to your New Relic dashboard and enhance your monitoring experience.

Installation

• Installation on windows was simple as you just have to download New Relic executable from their website. free trial is available. 
• After installing New Relic Server monitor. Log in to your New Relic account (Create one if you did not create.) You can see you dashboard.
• Click on Dashboard and click on Add more. It will pull up the list of compatible Operating systems along with instructions to go ahead with monitoring.
• It is important to note that their is a unique key supplied on this page for the monitoring to show any progress or logs in the system.

Configuring

• The configuration only involves copying the key to the New Relic Server monitor on your windows machine
• Go to Start > Programs > New Relic Server Monitor > Configure copy the key to the space provided.
• If you are using any proxy then you can add more details in the proxy tab

Start Service

• Once the required configuration has been done, just click on start service and start monitoring in you Dashboard in the web interface.

You can see Pie Charts, Graphs of total memory used by process, total memory free, disk space, network usage etc. Screenshots are attached. Happy Monitoring.