Understanding the parts of the software

A) Recovery image – Its a small program which starts when you press home+power while the phone is turned off. From this image you will be able to upgrade to new roms, make important nandroid backup, reach a recovery console, check your sd card etc. Normally you don’t change this software often and its not included when you download new releases from internet for installation. Update: The latest recovery image, cyanogen 1.3, has automatic nandroid restore, making it very easy for complete restore directly from the phone. No need to restore from spl any longer.

B) spl – its the second program loader. Its a small program which starts when you press back+power while the phone is turned off. From this image you will be able to restore your phone completely from a nandroid backup using fastboot. I am not so sure what more it does but the newest version is required to run most roms. Normally you don’t change this software often and its not included when you download new releases from internet for installation. Update: The latest recovery image, cyanogen 1.3, has automatic nandroid restore, making it very easy for complete restore directly from the phone. Nio need to restore from the spl any longer.

C) Radio image – Its the software which handles the phones radio communication (gprs, 3g, wifi etc). This software has so far only been released by google or HTC and its vere recommendable to update to the latest version.

D) The Android ROM – This is the part which holds the android OS and which you probably will change often. New releases are coming all the time.

Install lastest software and builds:

Edit: Since I wrote this guide, someone else posted a better guide for a better way to root your phone. I actually recommend you to follow this guide instead. So you may jump down to the “Nandroid backup” section below.

1) Well written guide how to root your phone and install hard spl and recovery image. Note that you only need to follow the guide until “what to do now when you have root”

2) Install latest recovery image. The link has installation instructions. Update: The latest recovery image, cyanogen 1.3, has automatic nandroid restore, making it very easy for complete restore directly from the phone. No need to restore from the spl any longer.

3) Install latest radio image. Download the image from this page. It can be upgraded by normal procedure. Rename the file to update.zip, place it in the root of your sd card, boot into recovery home+power, and choose to apply update.zip.

4) Install latest spl. Download the image from this page and install in same way is the radio image. Its very important to install the radio before this new spl.

5) Install the ROM you like. Basic instruction is that you download a rom and install in the same wat as radio and spl. However, be sure to read the instructions form the person who released the ROM. A very good page overviewing the roms is the Android ROM build database. As a first ROM I recommend to use any of JF’s roms which is a rooted version of the officially released roms, for latest US version JF 1.51, can be downloaded from his blog.

Nandroid backup

Nandroid is a way to make a complete backup of your phone from the recovery console and save it to the sd card. Always do a nandroid backup before installing a new rom, it only takes a minute. The nandroid software is already included in the latest recovery image mentioned above. To make a backup is easy, boot into recovery console which you know how to do by now and chose to make a nandroid backup.

To restore is more difficult.  The second post in this thread is quite good but instructions how to put AdbWinApi.dll and install fastboot is not so detailed. Basically you need to download and copy adbWin.dll and fastboot.exe in the windows/system32 folder. However, when you have done suceeded with that, the rest is easier.

Update: The latest recovery image, cyanogen 1.3, has automatic nandroid restore, making it very easy for complete restore directly from the phone. No need to restore from the spl any longer.

App2SD

A common problem with the G1 is that the internal memory is not enough. There are several ways how to put and run the apps from the sd card. I will only give you some guidelines.

The filesystem of the sd card is fat32. Its a file system both linux and windows can understand but its not good enough to use for the actual OS. Android is made from Linux and use either Ext2 or Ext3 (i don’t know) which are linux file systems. In order to make Apps2sd you will need to minimise the fat32 partition on the sd card with recomendably 500 Mb of space. This 500 Mb should then be formatted to EXT2. After you created this partition AFTER the main FAT32 partition on the sd card, it is ready for app2sd. One way to create a EXT2 partition on your sd card is to download the latest ubuntu linux, burn to cd, and run it on your computer from boot without installing. When Ubuntu is loaded, you can mount your SD card from android, start the program gparted in Ubuntu. In gparted you should try to:
a) find your sd card in the right top corner (understand its the right one by the size)
b) click on your large fat32 partition, right click and chose unmount
c) right click and chose resize. You should have 0 byte before the partition and what you need (maybe 500 Mb) for the ext2 after the partition. FAT32 shall be first.
d) Click on the empty space, chose format into ext2 (or ext3 if you have a rom supporting ext3).
e) click apply and wait

(There is also some paragorn software which you can install in windows for this purpose as an alternative.

Its difficult to explain how to do next becuase it seems to be different for each rom. But if you use Cyanogen v3.4, the rom will automatically install itself correctly as app2sd. This is also the rom I use myself and I recommend for app2sd at the moment.

Resources and extras

XDA developers forum. I will go as far as saying that ALL answers can be found there. Use the search function.

ADB is googles software to sue for developing purpose. You can install apps into the phone directly from your computer and much much more. Here is a guide into installing and using ADB.

In many countries it isn’t possible to access priced items in the market. Download and install the market enabler from here and it will now be possible.

Download and install a Tether program from this location, in order to turn your phone into a wireless internet router.

Extra: In order to make a good flash of a new rom its often recommended that you wipe your data first. These days its not a problem wiping. By downloading the free and most important backup program “Backup for root user” you can backup and restore more or less everything in your telephone including app data and even install all apps in one click as well as market data so that the apps will reappear in the market as installed .

I hope this was helpful. Please understand that some parts could be a bit off since I am quite a noob too. If any major mistakes, please let me know.

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