Hosts file access?

[nick_danger]

For starters, I searched for this before posting and found nothing on this forum.

Second, I'm not a noob, at least I don't think I am. I've installed Froyo on my old HTC Touch Diamond, rooted my wife's Hero and installed Froyo, and I rooted my current Optimus S with very little effort. However, I'm frustrated that I can't save edits to the hosts file in the root/etc/ folder. This is where I need help and have gone from lurker to poster.

I'm not looking to steal ad revenue from free apps or anything, though that will be a result of my tinkering, I'm sure. My reasons are performance only. Example: Angry Birds plays perfectly in Airplane Mode (no ads), but stutters and slows down every time an ad is loaded in normal operation. I've noticed that more powerful phones don't have this issue.

Loading MinFreeManager as suggested by this forum has helped immensely with performance, but the ads in AB still make a large impact. With no option to buy an ad-free version, I'm left with no choice in that case. Otherwise, it's just a good idea to block malicious sites - ads or not.

Thanks in advance.

 

[zefie]

/etc is a symlink to /system/etc thus you need to remount /system rw

mount -o remount,rw /system /system

 

[trekkie1701c]

AdFree Android - Android app on AppBrain

This will block most advertising sites from your phone. Worked the one time I played Angry Birds, and seems to do decently in most other apps. Won't remove 100% of the ads, but at least all the annoying ones have stopped

 

[nick_danger]

Thanks, zefie and trekkie!

I went the easy route first and tried AdFree Android. Surprisingly, it was able to update the hosts file on its own - so now I don't really need to update it manually. Very nice!