Installing Google applications

If all has gone well, you should now be staring at the Android home screen. It will look rather bare, as the CyanogenMod installer doesn't set up any large friendly homescreen widgets, like you might expect to see on a screen this size.

It also doesn’t install familiar applications such as Gmail or Facebook - and nor do you get the Android Market app to download other applications from. So one of the first things you’ll want to do is install these.

To do this, connect your TouchPad to a wireless network (I’m assuming you know, or can work out, how to do this); then browse to the “Latest Version/Google Apps” page on the CyanogenMod wiki. The table at the bottom of the page contains links to various Google Apps packages: tap the download link for CyanogenMod 7 and let the zip file download onto your TouchPad.

To install this application package, you need to reboot into the ClockworkMod recovery environment. This is very simple: hold down the power button on your TouchPad for a second and you’ll see a menu with (among other options) a Reboot option. Tap it, select Recovery and tap OK.

In a few moments you’ll be at the ClockwordMod menu. ClockworkMod is a very simple interface for installing system ROMs and updates. You navigate it using the volume up and down buttons; press the Home button to select a menu item.

(You may also notice that your TouchPad now has a boot menu that lets you choose whether to boot into webOS or Android when you start it up: this uses the same buttons as ClockworkMod.)

To install your freshly-downloaded Google Apps package, navigate down and select “install zip from sdcard” from the main ClockworkMod menu, then select “choose zip from sdcard”. Browse into the “download” folder and select the Google Apps zip file.

You’ll then see a confirmation menu, offering one option to install the zip file and ten options simply saying “No”, just to make sure you don’t install the wrong file by accident. Go ahead and install the zip file – it only takes a few seconds. When that’s done, go back to the main menu and select “reboot system now”.

When you land back in Android you’ll be walked through the process of setting up your Google account and installing various apps, just as you would on a brand new Android phone or tablet.
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For more general information about the CyanogenMod team, visit the official website
Tutorial by PC Pro