cyanogenmod and Telus Samsung galaxy s ii x

[Chow, Chislon]

I cleaned up a S2X recently and can chip in about this.

The easy way to get into recovery is to do so via ADB. Otherwise, the
most reliable way to reboot into recovery is to pull the battery and
put it back in before performing the key combination. The bootloader
should be where it listens for the active vol-down key. You only need
to press the power button once to get the device to start booting - no
need to hold that button down.

You actually don't need to go into recovery right now. The first thing
you need to do is to replace/flash the current recovery partition. I
also recommend updating to Android 4.0.x from the OTA so you have the
newest bootloader and other firmware files before proceeding.

The easiest way to flash most Samsung Android phones is through
Windows using the low-level Odin factory tool. The S2X is Qualcomm, so
it can't use NVFlash, and Samsung Qualcomm devices don't use fastboot
via LK bootloader. There's a cross platform tool called Heimdall out
there if you want to do everything natively on Linux. Most
packages are distributed for use with Odin without any additional
modifications. Odin can be dangerous to use and is capable of
messing up the bootloader, so be careful with this.

For the S2X specifically, I recommend using this toolkit someone has
put together
here, which fetches everything you need including the drivers, Odin,and modified
recovery image for use with Odin. You'll need to enable ADB on the
device before proceeding. In your case, it is only necessary to
install the recovery image - you do not need to root your firmware, as
you will be overwriting it completely:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1650908

On Samsung devices, the typical method is to use Odin to flash a
modified recovery boot partition image. Then you can perform changes
directly from recovery mode, as you have superuser rights to
everything.

A heads up on Cyanogenmod on the S2X though. The S2X doesn't have the
same level of community support as Nexus and Nexus similar devices.
There are odd graphical
glitches with some workarounds you will need to be aware of. AOSP
browser performance isn't as quick as Samsung's optimized webkit. You
also lose the ability to perform touch-to-focus on all AOSP based
firmware. There are definite advantages to running the firmware from
Koodo/Telus as-is.
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