CyanogenMod 9 Alpha 0.6 for the HP TouchPad now available

CyanogenMod developer Dalingrin has released a minor update to CM9 for the HP TouchPad tablet. The latest software is still based on Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but it includes a handful of bug fixes and a few new features.

CyanogenMod 9 Alpha 0.6 offers some improvements for the touchscreen, an option to to hide the bottom toolbar in full screen mode, the ability to scroll through the quick settings menu, and preliminary support for ROM Manager Premium. ROM Manager is an Android app that lets you flash updates without first manually rebooting your device into ClockworkMod recovery and navigating through its menus.

The new software also now brings up a menu with several options when you press-and-hold the power button. You can shut down the tablet, reboot the TouchPad, take a screenshot, enable airplane mode, or changed a few other settings.

If you’re already running an earlier version of CyanogenMod Alpha 9, there are two easy ways to update:

1. Download the latest Alpha zip file (update-cm-9.0.0-RC0-Touchpad-alpha0.6-fullofbugs.zip) to your TouchPad, reboot into ClockworkMod Recovery, and choose to “install zip from sdcard.” You can find more detailed instructions in our post on updating from Alpha 0 to Alpha 0.5.
2. Place the latest Alpha zip file in the “cminstall” directory on your TouchPad and run ACMEInstaller on your computer to install the update the same way you installed Android in the first place. Once the update.zip file you want to install is in the cminstall folder, just check out our originalguide for installing Android 4.0 on the TouchPad and start with step 8.

If this is the first time you’re installing Android 4.0 on the TouchPad, you can use our step-by-step guide for installing CyanogenMod 9. It will walk you through the steps of adding Android, ClockworkMod Recovery, and the Moboot to a TouchPad which is already running HP webOS software.