Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Rooting the Nexus!

Rooting:

Rooting is a process that allows users of mobile phones and other devices running the Android operating system to attain privileged control (known as "root access") within Android's Linux subsystem with the goal of overcoming limitations that carriers and manufacturers put on some devices. It is analogous to jailbreaking on devices running the Apple iOS operating system.

That's how Wikipedia defines it! In short, you become the admin user a.k.a God! :) and mess up things the way you love!

I understand that the word Jailbreak sounds more like an illegal activity than 'Rooting' does. And actually their intentions are similar to their phonetics and so are the companies' views on them! Apple wants to prevent Jailbreaking on their devices while Google support rooting theirs! :)

Google is in fact urging it's partners, the hardware manufacturers to impose less restriction on the hardware/software and encouraging them to let the users decide how they want their phones. Although Android is now running more than just phones. For instance Android now runs Barnes & Nobles' e-Reader 'Nook', Sony's new Z-series Music Player, just to mention a few.

On that front, HTC has now officially released instructions along with the required tools, on their websites, to help customers unlock their phones.

The Nexus S comes with an awesome bootloader from Google that makes unlocking and rooting the devices the easiest! Easier than on any other phone.

Rooting the phone requires installation of a super user application on the device. Now the super user tool comes in two pieces - the binary which does the rooting and then the app that lives in the App drawer of the phones that gives and GUI to manage grant and revocation of SU rights to any other app as and when required.

The following is the breakup of the steps and each step is explained in detail in separate posts. This is to enable you to understand what you're upto and hence not again read the lines "Don't do this if you don't know what you're doing"!!!
  1. Unlock the bootloader
  2. Install custom Recovery
  3. Install the super user binary (& app).

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