Desire for Cyanogen

Posted on Thu 22 March 2012 in misc

It's been over a year and a half since I set up this site/blog so I thought it was about time to write something. For the past week and a half I've been on night shift at work which has a habit of over running and eating a lot of my spare time. This made me choose a couple of things I wanted to get working in the little time I had left during the day so without further ado, I'll jump into what I've been getting up to in the past couple of days.

I've owned the HTC Desire (GSM) for about a year and a half. It was one of the better phones at the time but there's a couple of things that are quite annoying about it; most notably the very limited internal storage. After Google+ and Swype there is very little room for much else. I decided to get Cyanogen hoping it was clear some of the HTC bloatware, give me some extra space and give a breath of fresh air to the phone. Also, it would be nice to move up from Froyo to Gingerbread

Getting S-OFF, root and CWM

Revolutionary will set the secureflag to off on the phone. Just download and run as root. I'm on Linux so ran into some issues when installing ClockworkMod:

 Do you want to download (Internet connection required) and flash ClockworkMod Recovery? [Y/n]
 Downloading recovery for your phone (bravo)...revolutionary: ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/getpagesize.c:32: __getpagesize: Assertion `_rtld_global_ro._dl_pagesize != 0' failed.

After some digging it was just easier to download CWM Recovery and install it manually. I followed the instructions posted by attn1 from the xda-developers forum:

  1. Download the adb tool and appropriate CWM img file
  2. Extract and put them all in the same directory
  3. Put the phone into fastboot USB mode
  4. Run
sudo ./fastboot flash recovery recovery_name.img

CWM is now installed! Now follow the instructions on the forum to obtain root!

If you'd like to read some more about CWM, here's a nice write-up.

Radio and Cyanogen

To get this rolling, we need the latest radio flashed using the fastboot process.

Then all that remains is flashing Cyanogen and Google Apps!

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