Episode: 2126
Title: HPR2126: My new (old) tablet
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2126/hpr2126.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:36:56

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This is HPR episode 2,126 entitled, My New Old Tablet.
It is hosted by Alpha 32 and in about 8 minutes long.
The summary is how I got the cruft of my LGG Pad 7.
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Good afternoon, HPR.
This is Alpha 32 coming to you from St. Louis.
I wanted to talk to you today about a tablet that I've been working on.
It is my LG V410.
It is a LG G Pad 7.
It is a 7-inch tablet, obviously.
I got it for a dollar from the AT&T folks because I can't say no to cheap tech.
I got this thing, it came stock with Android and all of the stuff that LG puts on their devices.
Which was not very awesome, I really didn't like how it was set up and all the cruft they put on there.
It was just really unpleasant.
So pretty well from the time that I got it, I was trying to route the thing
and install custom recovery and a different image, you know, flash a different image on there.
But it wasn't working.
I just couldn't figure out how to do it at all.
I kept googling and trying different applications and different route kits and whatnot.
I tried all those one-click route solutions, all those different flashing utilities.
I tried Sionagens, Auto-Route, install all that stuff.
Their app that's on a Play Store and it didn't work for me.
Apparently this guy has some peculiarities about it.
That make it dang near impossible to route, make usable.
I tried that, tried the Torp app, tried different route methods,
you know, purple drake and all those different guys and just nothing was working.
I struggled with this thing for about six months, just on and off.
I picked it up half a while and tried out again, not making progress,
just be frustrated, put it back in the drawer.
I tried ADB and ADB in fastboot, you know, doing stuff from a terminal in Linux.
That didn't work very well either.
What ended up working for me was this application called Flashify.
I was a little leery at first because it looks kind of sketchy
or it looks kind of sketchy to me.
But I wasn't using this tablet.
It didn't have any information on there that was sensitive.
And really it had been sitting at a drawer for a while.
So I didn't really care if it broke the thing or not.
It wouldn't make any difference.
But it worked.
I downloaded a Torp.
It's a Team 1 recovery protocol or whatever.
And flashed that and it worked.
It booted it back up into recovery, which is a little awkward on this device.
On this V410, you got to hold down power and bite down until you see the LG logo.
You let go of power and hold all three buttons down.
And then it'll ask you if you want to wipe the device to do a factory reset.
You guys like yes and are you sure?
Yes.
It's kind of scary.
I think you're going to just wipe this thing and ruin all your work.
And you may well, it could happen, I suppose.
But that's how you get into recovery.
Once you select yes, I'm sure it'll act like it's going to do a factory data reset.
That's what it says.
It's going to do.
And then it boots up into recovery.
And luckily, for me, it booted up into TWRP.
And I was able to load images and flash a different ROM on there, which is nice.
I started out.
I tried to flash, signage it straight off the bat.
I just picked the latest release, flashed it, and booted it up.
But I didn't flash Google Apps at that time.
I booted it and it worked fine.
It wasn't really buggy at all.
I did all change when I turned it off and flashed Google Apps.
I used open G apps, the nano package that I usually use.
And when I booted it back up after doing that, it was freaking out.
It just wouldn't work.
It kept saying such and such as stock working.
It seemed like every service that was on the thing had stopped working.
The two zips just weren't getting along.
I think it might be because the signage mod that I downloaded was a nightly, or it could
be because I didn't clear the Dalvik cache.
I don't know.
Anyway, it didn't work.
I shut it down, cleared the cache, reflashed signage mod, reflashed G apps, booted it back
up at the same deal.
So I think those guys just wouldn't get along.
So I went back and found a stable release, which was trying to last November or something.
They don't build images, I guess, for these obscure devices very often.
It was Android 5.1, but they had a stable release for it, so that was a little disappointing.
I flashed that, flashed G apps, then I found out, oh, I flashed 6.0 G apps on a 5.1 image,
so I'd read it all over again.
I'll tell you, I probably reflashed this thing five or six times before I got it right.
I was a little annoying, but I eventually got the 5.1 image flashed, flashed the G apps for
the 5.1, the nano package, and it works.
It works great.
I've got a nice skin on there, an Android Nougat skin, CM13 or CM14 style skin, all the
material design.
It looks pretty nice.
And now it's just working.
Pretty happy.
I'm not sure about security aspects of it.
If we're going to get some updates with these devices from the scientific folks, but I'm
just happy to have it work.
So there you go.
That's my experience with flashing or trying to flash an LG G tab 7 and how I did and
did not flash it.
That's how you don't do it and then how you do do it.
So there you go.
All right.
You'll have a good day.
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