Since getting the Galaxy Nexus, I've had a little trouble and have been flashing ROMs like crazy and spending enough time in recovery that I could have put Betty Ford's kids through college. Wait... I'm not sure that made sense.
Anyway, I assumed the problems were from hacks being rushed to the public with little testing, but I think I actually got a lemon and am going to swap it for a new one.
To begin with, I kept losing root after an hour or two for some unknown reason. I noticed that the file manager I was using was registering battery usage almost as high as the display after one such unrooting, so I stopped using it. That helped me get through a day or two with root intact, but I'm not entirely sure that was the problem because I was working in the terminal last night and lost root again.
I've also had random shutdowns and really bad slowdowns, and I've spend a couple of days trying, and failing, to get ssh to work. Oddly, I can ssh from the phone to my computer from anywhere on the cell network, but it simply will not work when connected to my router.
On the router, I had assigned the phone a certain IP address but it seemed to connect at a different one for the past few days. I kept setting it, thinking maybe I had kept forgetting to hit "apply" or something, until I finally realized tonight that I had set it yesterday for a different MAC address.
A little investigation revealed that my phone's MAC address changes on every boot. Oops, MAC addresses aren't supposed to do that! It's a pretty neat trick but not only troublesome for IP reservation, but could be causing a lot of other problems as well.
I found someone else on XDA who had the same problem and Samsung said it was a hardware problem and swapped it for him. Verizon's phone number is right there on the charger and I didn't know Samsung's so I called the big V and they were a little puzzled. They called Samsung and they were puzzled too, but the Verizon guy told me to swap it.
I'm going to swap it at the store tomorrow so I don't have to wait for one to be shipped.
It nearly brought a tear to my eye, but I just typed "fastboot oem lock" in a terminal and brought my phone back to stock. But hopefully I'll be ready to start playing with the GNex for real after tomorrow.
Android and Linux
