Finally in hand! Some last minute questions...

[cmags]

Finally got the Optimus in hand. Got two of them, one in gray for myself, and one in purple for my wife. Immediately applied the ebay screen protectors I described in the screen protector thread and let 'em charge. Full up now and have been playing around with it a bit - got email setup, played angry birds (yea yea I know), and checked out AC on the mobile.

So enough with the basics, time to mod.

Been reading up around here, looking at rooting, adding a custom recovery, and flashing ThundeROM (in that order, right?) but got a couple quick questions before I dive in.

Rooting isn't much more than adding the su command to the kernel, right? Then we can make use of it by installing the Superuser app from the market?

After flashing the custom recovery, it is from here that we can make a complete backup image of the phone for restoration if necessary, right? So I'd be able to make the backup then flash a new ROM, and decide to go back if I didn't like it? What kind of file is output from a nandriod backup?

Looks like I'll flash TR 1.4 since they pulled stagefright but left JIT. Gotta check if AdFree is in there or if i'll need to add it. Swipe is in there since its v9 based right?

Once thats all done i can start customizing for real. This will be fun.

 

[kalex]

Swype is built in since V9 udpate. Adfree is not in the ROM.

Once you flash custom recovery then u can backup original rom using nandroid and restore it later if u need to. Nandroid generates img files. If you need to restore, just boot into custom recovery and run nandroid restore. it will find the files on your sd card in \nandroid folder.

You are correct on rooting. You install the exploit and then once its activated you install su as well as busybox to the phone

 

[cmags]

Sweet thanks for the confirmation. I'll start gathering and installing the necessary files tomorrow when more awake.

 

[ccrs8]

Sweet thanks for the confirmation. I'll start gathering and installing the necessary files tomorrow when more awake.

While still on stock you may want to check your software version. If you are on v9, great. If your phone came with v8, you may want to update to v9 while still running stock. While ThundeROM is based off of v9, it does not have the radio update that came with v9 because you can't update the radio via recovery. If you install ThundeROM from a v8 stock phone, you'll have v9 software but a v8 radio. Not a big deal and not something I would revert back to stock to grab unless I was having problems, but if you're still on stock, you may as well, right?

 

[cmags]

Thanks for the tip. It came with v9 so I should be set.

I do have one more question though. Regarding copying files to the sd card, do we mount via the phone and copy, pull the card and use an adapter, or something else? When the card is mounted, what filesystem is it? I want to set up the card for apps and data (such as photos, vid, and music), so should I partition and format the card ahead of time?

Thanks for patronizing a noob. I know just enough about linux to confuse myself over the minutia.

 

[ccrs8]

Thanks for the tip. It came with v9 so I should be set.

I do have one more question though. Regarding copying files to the sd card, do we mount via the phone and copy, pull the card and use an adapter, or something else? When the card is mounted, what filesystem is it? I want to set up the card for apps and data (such as photos, vid, and music), so should I partition and format the card ahead of time?

Thanks for patronizing a noob. I know just enough about linux to confuse myself over the minutia.

You can copy however you like. Easiest is to just mount the phone, but you can use an adapter (one of the benefits of an accessible sd card...my Samsung Moment required battery removal to get to the card). Heck, I've connected to my phone via SSH and copied files over the network. Probably easiest just to plug your phone in to you computer.

I don't know what format my SD card is. I can mount it in Windows, Linux, and Mac as read-write and I can run apps off of it as well as store my music. I'm at a Windows XP computer now, so I just mounted the sd card by plugging the phone in to the computer, and when I went to the properties of the mounted drive, it said the format was "RAW."