rooting my G1

I had been resisting rooting my T-Mobile G1 Android phone, but finally tiring of the sluggish performance of the hardware, and encouraged by Twitter friend @cym0n and this article, I decided to do it. It took a while to collect all the information I needed and get it done, but I managed.  I chose to use CyanogenMod 4.0.4.  I think it's no longer available because of the Google C&D issue, but I'll summarize anyway.  I basically followed RyeBrye's article "Android Rooting in 1-click".

• backed up the contents of the SD card
• recorded all the settings I wanted to reapply (WiFi passwords, notification ringtones, etc.)
• installed Recovery Flasher (I got it from http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.apk, which may or may not still work)
• ran Recovery Flasher, "reboot to recovery mode"
• partition the (8GB) SD card following http://androidandme.com/2009/08/news/how-to-manually-partition-your-sd-card-for-android-apps2sd/. I chose to use a 1GB ext4 partition for the apps2sd section, so my partition table looks like this (via parted run from adb shell):
  
  
  
  Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
   1      32.3kB  6893MB  6893MB  primary  fat32           lba
   2      6893MB  7916MB  1023MB  primary  ext4
   3      7916MB  7948MB  32.2MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)
  
  
  
• ran Recovery Flasher again, downloaded CyanogenMod 4.0.4 image, "Back up Recovery image", and rebooted to recovery mode
• at recovery screen, run "nandroid backup"
• run "wipe data"
• run "Apply any zip from SD", select CyanogenMod image
• reboot
• download http://n0rp.chemlab.org/android/audio-resources.zip and copy its contents to the root directory of the SD card
• reinstalled apps from the market
• got the MyFaves.apk file and installed it (don't quite remember where I got it; maybe here?)
• installed "Overclock Widget" from the market and set it for 528 (screen on) and 128 (screen off)

And that pretty much got it going.  It didn't go as smoothly as this summary indicates; I had to retry a number of things until I got it figured out.

If I were doing this again, one thing I would do differently would be to use ASTRO or something like that to back up all the apps to the SD card, which would make reinstalling them a lot easier.  Especially now that I have learned to use adb from the Android SDK.

The phone has been much more fun to use since rooting.