One thing with custom ROMs is that they can often make updating system apps somewhat troublesome. Such is the case for the new Car Home update that Google made available earlier today. You can read all about it here, but it basically adds features that we’ve all expected to have available in Car Home for a while. This includes the ability to edit the shortcuts, change the background, and even change the color of the icons.
If you don’t want to wait for an official workaround, you can do it yourself, provided you have purchased Root Explorer from the Android market (AppBrain link). First and foremost, make a nandroid backup, just in case you do something stupid accidentally.
Now, open Root Explorer and make sure that you’re in the highest directory, and then press menu, and choose ‘Search’. Type in ‘carhome’ and let Root Explorer search through your whole phone (it might take a minute or two). You should end up with about 8 results in various places. Go ahead and delete all of the files, except for the two that have the little green Android man next to them. These should both be ‘com.google.android.carhome.apk‘ and ‘com.google.android.carhome-launcher.apk‘. You’ll need to delete the first one individually.
Press the back button in Root Explorer and navigate to /system/app. Make sure you click the button at the top of your screen that changes Root Explorer to ‘R/W mode’ – now scroll down until you see the aforementioned ‘com.google.android.carhome.apk‘ and delete it. You can now exit Root Explorer and go ahead and reboot your phone.
If you accidentally delete the ‘com.google.android.carhome-launcher.apk’, don’t panic. You can extract this from the Gapps zip file that you used when you installed CyanogenMod v6. It’s in the /system/apps directory.
Once your phone reboots, you should be able search the Market for ‘Car Home’ (make sure you choose the Google one) and install easily.
Note: using Root Explorer is potentially dangerous – be very careful, especially when you’re in ‘R/W mode’, because you *could* potentially mess something up. If you do, don’t blame me, it’s your fault. However, assuming you followed my instructions, just restore the nandroid backup you made before you started and you should be good to go. I’m not responsible if you hose your phone.
Ricky Cadden 