Thread: Changing the User Agent on the N9/N950. Simple(ish) downloads to change to Andoird 2.3.7 or iOS 5
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legoman666 is offline legoman666
2012-01-02 , 23:36
Posts: 185 | Thanked: 103 times | Joined on Aug 2008
#1
It was difficult, but I was able to do it:


If you don't know how to reverse this, I wouldn't suggest trying it.

From a desktop, fire up your favorite sftp client and browse to your N9. Log in with the user account.

Browse to /usr/bin, copy the file "grob" and paste it somewhere on your machine.

Open "grob" with a hex editor and search for "Mobile" (case sensitive). The first result should be in the middle of the UA.

Edit the UA from
Code:
Mozilla/5.0 (MeeGo; NokiaN9) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) NokiaBrowser/8.5.0 Mobile Safari/534.13
to:
Code:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.1) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30
You will need to pad the end of the UA hex with "00" because the Android string is a little shorter than the original. The new UA MUST be the same length as the old one in grob. That is, the final file size must be exactly 1,143,292 bytes.

Other users, including myself, have been unable to get an iOS UA to work, though you can try your luck. Someone shared an iOS grob, but it appears to have changed when he uploaded it.

Backup the original grob, and copy the edited "grob" back to your N9. Make sure the permissions were maintained (probably weren't, so check!)
Originally Posted by rcs1000 View Post
you need to do:
chown root /usr/bin/grob
chmod 755 /usr/bin/grob

That's it! You might need to reboot your phone for the changes to take effect, I didn't though.

For the Lazy:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52619173/grob.iOS.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52619173/grob.Andoird2.3.7.zip

Download, unpack. Copy to N9 /home/user via sftp
SSH into N9, get root command line:
Code:
rm /usr/bin/grob
cp /home/user/grob.XXXXXXX /usr/bin
mv /usr/bin/grob.XXXXXXXX /usr/bin/grob
chown root /usr/bin/grob
chmod 755 /usr/bin/grob
I've tried a few sites:
Facebook loads the Android specific mobile version and seems to work perfectly, including where they recommend you install the Facebook Android App
Gmail loads the swanky Android-only mobile version instead of the dumb-phone version that it used to. Everything seems to work.
Google Maps loads the fully featured Android mobile version, but doesn't really work. It just says "loading" after asking to allow geolocation.
Google+ works great (It did before with the old UA anyway)
Google Voice loads the dumb phone version still (I don't think they have a decent web interface?).
Google Music throws a security error. (Might be because I didn't put a "U;" in the UA)
Youtube now refreshes the page when you click play with an Android UA. Maybe trying an older Android UA string would fix this. With iOS UA, it tells me to enable videos in Safari settings. Seems like we just can't win.
With the iOS UA, the BBC iPlayer loads, but I live in the US and don't feel like messing with proxies, so I can't actually test.

Anyway, I can give more specific instructions if required, but I don't want to encourage users to do this who don't understand the basic instructions above.
Last edited by legoman666; 2012-01-04 at 14:56.
 

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