i'm getitng the touch on 3/1 and while i've done a bunch of research online, i was just wondering what is the easiest root method and most popular rom/recovery. im coming from the evo 4g and just found out about a week ago about mikg which i love so much i almost don't want a new phone but realize that if i had taken a minute to ask around a little i probably would have learned about (and enjoyed) it much sooner. just don't want to make the same mistake twice!
Well, things are in a bit of a transition now with the first ICS builds leaking out over the weekend. It won't be long before we have custom ROMs built from the ICS base (actually there is an early one out already) once more of the bugs are worked out. But, for Gingerbread and the current firmware ...
I just linked the XDA development forum for this phone, as there a bunch of ROMs to choose from. Calkulin's (who you may know from the EVO scene) and Blazer are probably the most popular ROMs currently. I'm running TNz Blend right now and I like it a lot. It's the perfect mix of light theming and features for me, and it's very fast and dependable. ROMs are a very personal thing though, and trying them is the only way to find one you like. There is a CM7 kang available, but it's unfinished and no longer being developed. There is also a MIUI build, and a CM9 kang being worked on but it's still in the early stages.
Recovery: Clockwork Mod is the only one available at the moment. But Team Rogue has been releasing modified versions of it which are nice. Recovery is different on Samsung phones than HTC. The recovery is packed into the kernel, so when flashing a kernel you're always flashing whatever recovery that the dev packed into it as well.
Well in both HTC and Samsung cases, the recovery is packed into/with the kernel. HTC (and most other platforms) just use separate partition to keep the boot kernel and recovery kernel.
Samsung also has a separate partition that is labeled "recovery.bin" but it is not being used and appears to just serve as a backup for the standard kernel (which is labeled zImage) as both partitions contain the exact same contents as confirmed by md5 checksum.
I almost think it is a bug/oversight that they don't use the separate partitions.
Coming from a different platform, it was the first thing that confused me regarding how Samsung has things set up.
I agree with @JayWill72 in that there is a transition going on...in a good way
Personally, I have enjoyed Rogue Recovery and Kernal combination put together by Steady Hawkin et al.
Thanks for the educational post @sfhub. I have wondered why the recovery and kernal were always packed together. My previous device was a HTC Hero and things were a little different...This Samsung device has been a bit of a learning curve.
wow there's certainly a bunch of them out there! i'll def be busy over the next few days (weeks) deciding which one i prefer. at least this time i know there's a bunch of options and i won't be stuck with one i don't like!
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