keeping data during orientation changes by using fragments - android-fragmentactivity

Question

I am trying to understand fragments. All the examples I read is about having a main activity and then two sub fragments.
The issue is that my program has only 1 activity. Can I make it a fragment?
Current ui main class
public class MainActivity extends Activity {}
Can I make it
public class MainActivity extends Fragment {}
The program I am trying to create will constantly monitor phone variables and display logs in a textView. I don't want to lose the logs when the user changes the orientation or some other change when the os destroys the ui.
The UI is basically 1 textView that gets filled by a runnable that updates the textView every 5 seconds with the content of a linked list. I don't want to lose the content of the linked list basically.
I checked getLastNonConfigurationInstance() but it seems it's depreciated so I don't want to use that
Any help would be highly appreciated.
Amish

Answer 1

Found answer here:
http://blog.webagesolutions.com/archives/458
So after a lot of searching I found that if you add the following:
android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize"
in the androidManifest.xml, the os will not destroy the activity when switching from portrait mode to landscape mode.
My xml file looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.axr0284.phonecontrol"
android:versionCode="1"
android:versionName="1.0" >
<uses-sdk
android:minSdkVersion="14"
android:targetSdkVersion="15" />
<application
android:allowBackup="true"
android:icon="#drawable/ic_launcher"
android:label="#string/app_name"
android:theme="#style/AppTheme" >
<activity
android:name="com.axr0284.phonecontrol.MainActivity"
android:label="#string/app_name"
android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize">
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>
</activity>
</application>
</manifest>
Hope this helps somebody,
Amish