With Barnes & Noble now selling the Galaxy Tab S2 710 (32gb) for $299 in the U.S. (and an extra 10% off if you're a B&N member), I picked one up yesterday and immediately came here to research rooting and set up. What I found were a lot of guides written a while ago, and a lot of confusing (at least to me) information. So I thought I would consolidate, in one place, in a new thread, what I eventually did, on the assumption that there might be a lot of new Tab S2 owners in the coming weeks. Obviously, you undertake these steps at your own risk, and YMMV. Also, hopefully equally obviously, none of the fantastic tools here are original with me -- credit goes to all those, like chainfire, ashyrx, wanam, engine95 and many more who have built and/or developed them.
1. If your Tab comes with anything but 5.1.1 XXU2BPB1, feel free to take the OTA update. In the US, it's the most current build as of 4.30.16 and you will still be able to root.
2. If you don't already have it, download Odin 3.10.7. You can find it here:
http://ift.tt/11Z9Nfp When you run Odin in Windows, probably better to run it in administrator mode (right click on the icon), although I haven't always found that to be necessary.
3. Flash a Custom Recovery using the PDA tab of Odin. Put your Tab into Download mode by turning it off, then pressing and holding the Home, Power and Volume Down buttons all at the same time. When the download screen comes up, press the Volume Up button to continue. Now you're ready to attach your Tab to your PC. Load TWRP 3.0.2-1 from Ashyx's thread here:
http://ift.tt/1QHXeWL into Odin. Follow his instructions carefully -- once the custom recovery flashes, you have to manually reboot into the new recovery (so untick the auto-reboot option in Odin) or else your new custom recovery gets overwritten and you go back to your stock recovery.
4. Backup your Stock Rom -- While you're still in TWRP (or if you've already rebooted, go back to it), it would make sense to do a full backup of your stock ROM. That way you can restore your Tab to its original state if you ever need or want to.
5. Root -- Here's where I found the most confusion on these forums. You can do a systemless root -- i.e., keeping a stock, SE Enforcing, kernel (as opposed to flashing a permissive kernel and always getting the red SE Noneforcing Kernel message on a reboot and/or needing to use CF-Auto-Root). All you need to do is install Super SU 2.71 (BETA). Get the zip from here:
http://ift.tt/1H95YEo and put it on your Tab. Then flash using the "Install" choice within your TWRP recovery. Reboot -- and when TWRP asks you whether you want to install SuperSU because you're not rooted -- you have to say "NO" (OK, that's counterintuitive, but chainfire's instructions are clear).
5. Debloat -- That's beyond this thread's scope, but I recommend Titanium Backup from the Play Store. If you want to get rid of the "Nook" logo on reboot, flash the zip file from post #2 of Engine95's thread (using TWRP) found here:
http://ift.tt/1QHXeWP 6. SD Card Fix -- if you find your third party apps can't write to your SD Card, the attachment below describes how to fix it. If this type of editing scares you (make a backup first!), the Play Store app SD Card Fix supposedly still works with Lollipop and you can try that.
7. Netflix Fix -- for some reason, Netflix doesn't like root on the Nook Tab. The fix for this is as simple as renaming the file "system/lib/liboemcrypto.so" (using a root explorer of your choice) as "system/lib/liboemcrypto.so.bak"
8. Xposed -- I happen to like Xposed and don't find it messes up anything, while giving you a ton of customization options. Installation is a two-step process. First, find the correct version of wanam's Xposed zip from here:
http://ift.tt/1IZsDRS, and flash it using TWRP. For Lollipop on the S2, I used his SDK 22-arm version (SDK 23 is for Marshmallow). Don't worry if the reboot takes a long time -- that's normal. Then, once rebooted, simply install wanam's Xposed apk (XposedInstaller_3.0_Alpha4) that's available in the same thread.
That's it. I hope this saves some of you a lot of my trial and error, and, if it does, please press the "thanks" button.
