CM9 beta3 for Epic 4G Release Notes

CyanogenMod's Team Epic is proud to announce the release of CM9 beta3 for Sprint's Samsung Epic 4G. Please follow us on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter for the latest news. This release contains many new features and significant bug fixes!

Release Notes

• IMPORTANT! Before you upgrade to CM9 beta3, DO THIS to prevent possible issues.
• Remove Voltage Control, SetCPU, and uncheck "Set on boot" in Settings > Performance > Processor.
• If your GPS navigation was broken in CM9 beta2, uninstall and reinstall Google Maps.
• If you have had trouble with Gallery displaying photos in the wrong order, or thumbnails matching to the wrong photo, see this thread for a tool to run before you upgrade to beta3.
• If you have trouble with auto rotation after enabling the settings in the Customization Guide, try calibrating your sensors with the temporary FC09 sdcard utility.

Project News

• Launch of Team Epic - CyanogenMod's Sprint Samsung specialists

• Due to the success of EpicCM and the generous support of the Epic 4G community, we were able to recruit many developers and non-dev leaders to help with QA testing, documentation and answering questions.  This has allowed us to purchase additional dev phones in order to aid development of Epic Touch, Nexus S 4G and Sprint Galaxy Nexus.  We also have productive teamwork with Epic 4G's AOKP developer Alias8818, allowing us fix bugs faster in both CM9 and AOKP.  We are now continuing fund raising to purchase additional dev phones including Sprint's upcoming SGS3.
• kernel-3.0.x News
• One of our long-term goals is port a newer 3.0.x kernel work on Epic, and to maintain that kernel together with the very similar hardware of the Nexus S 4G.  KalimAz (CyanogenMod's maintainer of Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus) received an Epic 4G in Spain on May 3rd.  Now KalimAz, mkasick and bbelos are slowly getting closer on this goal, most recently they were working on fixing the wifi driver.

Tour of Android 4.0.4 ICS CM9 on Samsung Epic 4G

Changelog of CM9 beta3 (see previous)

• Theme Chooser
• The ability to customize look and feel of CM9 to user choice using predefined themes or community driven user inspired ideas. Preview the theme before applying to make sure its exactly what your looking for in a theme before applying to the phone.

• Lockscreen Shortcuts
• Allows you to choose lock screen shortcuts (1-5) anything from browser, Facebook, twitter and messaging, the choice is yours, with customizable icon's.

• Capacitive Buttons/Keyboard Backlight Disable Option

• One of the most exciting new features in CM9 beta3 for Epic 4G is the ability to disable the capacitive touchkey backlights.  Unlike other phones with multiple brightness levels, the touchkey lights on Epic 4G have only on and off.  Using the Epic in the dark would be often annoying as the touchkey lights are blindingly bright.
• Settings > Advanced > Disable Touchkey Lights turns off lights after a 750ms delay since you last touched it.  We designed it this way on purpose so the user has enough time to recognize the location identity of the four buttons.
• Settings > Display > Automatic backlight > Edit other levels... allows you to further customize when touchkey lights and even the keyboard backlight will be enabled based upon the light sensor levels.  0 means off and 255 means on.
• Unique Bluetooth MAC Address Fix
• Previously Epic CM9 used a generic MAC address instead of a unique per-device MAC address.  Since the bluetooth address has changed, all  users must re-pair their bluetooth devices before they may be used again.  This resolves several known issues with some newer bt devices.
• Gallery Photo GPS Fix
• All previous versions of CM9 for Epic 4G would an erroneous date of 1969 in the photo EXIF data if you have GPS enabled at the time of taking the photo.  This would cause the Gallery app to become confused and display photos in the wrong order.  All new photos taken by the Camera of CM9 for Epic 4G will no longer have this issue.  bbelos and Cyc of Team Epic wrote this tool and instructions for fixing your older photos.
• Conservative Overclocking
• CyanogenMod aims for maximum stability, so we have decided to include only the most conservative overclocking and no undervolting in the standard CM9 kernel.  Undervolting is known to work 99.99% of the time, but rare timings involving certain apps can cause the phone to spontaneously reboot.  It is our belief that many reports of random reboots are the result of unsafe overclocking or undervolting.  We will not ship the means for users to shoot themselves in the foot in the default operating system. 
• We have added only the 1.2GHz step, disabled by default.  You enable it in Settings > Performance > Processor > Maximum CPU frequency.  Since voltages cannot be changed, no add-on tools like Voltage Control are necessary.
• While 1.2Ghz maximum seems to be stable for most users, we do not recommend using it if you care about maximizing stability.
• Smoother cpufreq scaling
• All previous kernels have had trouble where it would no longer use the 100MHz step if you have changed your cpufreq or governor settings.  Major fixes were made to the kernel to allow cpufreq to scale more smoothly.  As a result, the cpufreq governors now behave differently.  The powersave governor has been removed as it causes extreme slowness, failures and consequential higher battery consumption. 
• GPS Navigation and Google Maps Fix
• CM9 beta2 added emulation for RotationVectorSensor2.  Unfortunately this exposed a race condition that can cause sensors to entirely deadlock, the cause of the rare reports of GPS Navigation failures we have been hearing lately.  beta3 contains teamhacksung's fix to the magnetometer driver to prevent this failure.
• If your GPS was already broken in CM9 beta2, you may need to uninstall and reinstall Google Maps in order to fix it.
• Camera Timer
• The Camera app now has the ability to set a countdown timer before a photo is taken.  While in the Camera, hit the Settings button, then the action bar (three dots), then tap the camera button.  The on-screen camera button will turn red and you will see a red countdown in the top left.  When it reaches zero it will take a photo.

Links

See the CM9 Status page for more details. Then proceed to the CM9 Install Guide.  Please check if your bugs are already filed in the Epic CM Issue Tracker.

If you appreciate this work, please consider supporting the Team Epic. Thank you!