After installing the really awesome CyanogenMod on my G1/HTC Dream I was facing the problem that the keyboard layout was switched to qwerty - while I really prefer that on all my computers, it is annoying to use if you have to guess all the Alt keys.

There are several opinions out there about what to do to change the keyboard layout - the following procedure works well for me:

First download the android sdk if you haven't done so yet, you'll need adb from the tools directory. Connect your phone via USB and run

adb devices

to check if adb is able to detect the phone. If not, you probably need to setup the device permissions correctly. If adb is able to detect your devices, use it to remount /system read-write and enter a shell:

adb remount
adb shell

Paste the following into the adb shell - please note that the phone will reboot. If you don't want that, don't paste the reboot line.

cp /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-qwertz.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin
cp /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-qwertz.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v2.kcm.bin
cp /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-qwertz.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad.kcm.bin
cp /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-qwertz.kl /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-v3.kl
cp /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-qwertz.kl /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-v2.kl
cp /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-qwertz.kl /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad.kl
reboot

Now your keyboard layout should be qwertz again.

As there're several, more or less well working howtos about creating udev rules to allow access to the USB debug devices of Android phones out there in the wild, I decided to write my own one. It works at least for Debian Testing/Squeeze. The udev rules file I provide here works at least for the HTC Dream models (aka T-Mobile G1 and Google Devphone).

As a computer may be used by more than one user, I've decided to create a group called androiddev. Members of the group will be allowed to access the debug interface. Running (hint: become root first)

addgroup --system androiddev

will create the group for you. Add your developers to the group with

adduser username androiddev

(of course replace username with the user you'd like to add) and we're ready to configure udev. Open /etc/udev/rules.d/android.rules in an editor and add the following lines:

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c01", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c02", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0fff", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android-fastboot%n"

That's it. Udev will reload and activate the new ruleset. Don't forget to re-login to make sure your new shiny group will show up! Now have fun with adb and fastboot Thanks to TauPan from #debian/freenode.net who gave me the idea for this blog post.

Second Update: Added the proper line for fastboot and cleaned up the howto.