Enable Soft-Keys on Samsung Galaxy Note 2

I wanted to enable the soft-keys on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 after switching to the new nightly builds of CyanogenMod 10.1.

I found that it is actually rather easy to turn them on. It just requires modifying the build.prop with the following:

qemu.hw.mainkeys=0

If you want to disable them later just change it to:

qemu.hw.mainkeys=1

After you modify the build.prop you have to reboot for the changes to take affect.

This change will turn on the soft-keys, but it does not disable the hardware keys. But you can disable them too. You have to open /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl and comment out the following by added a '#' to the beginning of the line.

# key 158	BACK
# key 139	MENU

The home key is located in /system/usr/keylayout/gpo-keys.kl

# key 172	HOME	WAKE

To turn these back on just remove the '#' and reboot.

Stuck at Vibrant Screen after Update

I was stuck at the Vibrant screen after applying the official OTA update from T-Mobile the other day on my Samsung Vibrant. Most people were saying it was because of not running the Stock firmware, but I did not have any real “mods” to the OS, except for a GPS fix. I have also heard people that are running full, non-rooted, Stock firmware phones and still having the same issue.

I wanted to post the steps I took to fix my problem. Your results may vary, and I am in no way, shape or form, responsible for any problems that you may have because you read this and did what worked for me. I am just posting it because it worked for me, and others.

1. Download ODIN3 1.0
2. Download 512 PIT
3. Download JFD tar
   • Note that all 3 of those are from the same thread. It also wouldn't hurt for your to read that post too.
4. Open Odin, plug in your phone, then put it into download mode.
• To expand on this because a lot of people were asking "how to put in download mode". The easiest way I found to actually do it, if you can can connect via ADB is to do the following:
  
  # reboot download
  
  If you can't get that to work, try how i mention below (phone off, battery out, hold vol+ & vol-), or try searching these forums for "vibrant download mode" you will find other things that "work" for people
5. load the PIT file in appropriate area.
6. load the .tar file in the PDA area.
7. DO NOT check 're-partition'.
8. Click start, let it finish.
• At this point ODIN failed on me. and I got the "mobile-!-pc" image.
9. Now, pull your battery and unplug USB
10. I also took out the SIM and sdcard at this point.
11. bring the phone to download mode again
1. plug the USB back in (the phone should be off)
2. Hold down vol+ & vol-
3. Put battery back in
4. press power
12. re-run ODIN as mentioned above
    

Once ODIN completed successfully, it rebooted in to the Stock build. i let it do all that. then I shut it off, put the sdcard and SIM back in and booted in to recovery and restored from my Nandroid and I was back to the way it was right before I applied the update.