LG VM510 filesystem innards, tricks, and treats

[Renate]

Thanks, BigSuperSquid! The ringtones work pretty easily. The menus get a bit more complicated since Google Maps may be ams/15 on one RT and ams/17 on another. I haven't found where the icons are yet either. There is another program for generating menus that makes it easier to put in selections without having to remember icon filenames or cryptic commands. I'll post it soon.

[Renate]

Here's a little Windows command line utility for generating the opening menu on a Rumor Touch.

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

There are three types of selections that it takes:

1) A regular selection or sub-menu selection.
Examples are "Settings", "Surf the Web", "Email + IM".
The spellings must be identical to the original name.
The strings must be enclosed in double quotes if there are spaces in them.
If you would like to rename them, you can append an alias separated by an exclamation mark.
An example is "Surf the Web!Browser".
To list all the possible selections, type lgmenu /l

2) A downloaded or pre-installed application.
This gets a bit trickier. Applications are installed in ams/??, where ?? is two digits.
The installed directory is not the same on two different handys.
You can peek in the .JAD files to find out where what is, ams/11/11.jad.
It still gets tricky. You have to specify an alias that matches exactly the original selection.
If you get it wrong, you will get a warning message on your handy when you select it.
The warning message is all screwed up and overwritten on the screen.
You have to use ams and the AMS number plus the original name (as alias).
A correct example is "ams:17!Google Maps".
On your handy the 17 could be any number.

3) A full URL including http://
If you do not specify an alias, it will trim the leading http:// and the trailing / to use.
"http://www.google.com/" would appear as [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
"http://www.google.com/!My Googly Place" uses an alias.

There are only 15 selections allowed. It is suggested that "Main Menu" be one of them.
"Add" (as in add menu selection) might be another good choice.

If you want, you can put your selections in a text file.
With one entry per line you do not need to use any double quotes.
You invoke the utility with an @
lgmenu @mylist.txt

Subsequent versions of this utility may use different handling of the arguments.

[El Schisne]

Has anyone found a way to remove the "read-only Erase Protect feature" on the stock VM apps? I'd really like to get rid of Email+IM and Virgin Mobile Navigator.

Also, thank you very much for the menu insights, Renate! I think this is enough incentive to unlock my phone after all. I'll try that when I do.

[bigsupersquid]

Has anyone found a way to remove the "read-only Erase Protect feature" on the stock VM apps? I'd really like to get rid of Email+IM and Virgin Mobile Navigator...

Even when you set the "Content-Delete-Lock: Yes" to No in the .jad files in the /ams/xx folders, you can't delete the apps even though it shows an open lock on the menu icon.
You can, however, do as I did and replace them with other apps, I just haven't found where to change their names. So you have a different app which activates when you select the original name off the applications menu. I didn't like the apps which could cost me money if accidentally activated, like navigator and contact vault, so I put something else in their places, as well as all the social apps. see further up the thread for instructions. Your phone has to be unlocked to do it.
see:
replacing apps [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
and
replacing icons [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Renate]

I would guess that even though the lock originates in Content-Delete-Lock: Yes in the .jad
that the current state is actually stored in ams/db/contentInfo or ams/db/executionInfo
I haven't looked in-depth at these two files yet.

[bigsupersquid]

Ok, so I've written a j2me file downloader program, and during testing of it I have learned some very interesting things.

.gif images are compressed and animation frames removed by the phone internet server if the image resolution is greater than the phone's display can handle. My 320x320 animated .gif is reduced to a 170x170 single-frame .gif if downloaded through my MIDlet. Opera does not seem have this restriction and downloads the animation correctly and without reducing the resolution from the same URL. This gives me hope that there is a workaround by using a proxy, which I haven't found the J2ME instructions for doing yet.
If the same 320x320 .gif file is put into a .zip file, my downloader handles it correctly.
Big news about .jad files (at least to me...)
Apparently the lockout on downloading .jad files may not be in the browser. When trying to download a .jad though a HttpConnection, StreamConnection, or ContentConnection, the following problem occurs.
Rather than the requested .jad file being fetched, an .html file is downloaded instead:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Access denied</p>
</body>
</html>

I'm pretty sure this is the same page the browser displays when trying to fetch a .jad file.

.jar files, however, do download correctly through my MIDlet with no errors. (good news there at least, one out of two ain't bad!)

Once the MIDlet is prettied up a bit I will release it for others of you to play with.
Any info from experienced J2ME programmers is welcome, since I'm a newbie to Java of any type; my experience is in old-school languages like BASIC and various flavors of assembly language, and a little G-code for machine tools. I'm only about 10 years out of practice with BASIC and about 20 years out of practice in assembly (the Pentium wasn't available to me when I was still programming chip-level code... shows my age.)
I learn fast, though, and this file downloader is my first attempt at programming in J2ME... not too shabby considering two weeks ago I'd never even looked at Java code. I'll get it working eventually, and I like to share, so once it's done, out it goes for everyone to have!