Discussions about rooting the Ally

[will123w]

BTW looks like we will have Root access in just a few more days http://androidforums.com/lg-ally/105...nt-root-2.html

[Android.net]

Android.net is the premier Android Forum on the internet.

[zacwhite15]

BTW looks like we will have Root access in just a few more days http://androidforums...ant-root-2.html

good news peeps the Ally has been successfully rooted here is the link for the process the guy used



http://androidforums.com/all-things-...ml#post1031026

[heffe2001]

I was headed over here to post about that, as I'm betting there's going to be a bunch of interest in it. You'll be able to remove the apps you don't want, tether wirelessly, and lots of other stuff now that they have root access to the phone .

[will123w]

I've never rooted a phone myself. Do you have a to have a linux machine to do this so far?

[Jump]

Have fun with that rooting. You can make the phone a whole lot better. Be sure you understand the procedure. You void your warranty doing it, and if you make a mistake, you'll probably brick your phone. Hackers have ruined thousands of phones making them work better. Believe me, you don't know how many hackers corrupt system files, then take it to Verizon and say, "gee, I don't know what happened to it" hoping for a free replacement.

And depending on the improvements you make, you might violate your TOS with Verizon.

[Dolfan0925]

Ya that's what I was thinking. I'll leave my root the way it is.

[Cleveland]

what exactly does rooting do?

[flyinjoe13]

.



Would love to try rooting, but don't understand the steps. Not really a linux guy, although I do have a PC with Ubuntu on it but haven't fired it up in over 2 years. Installed it a couple of years ago to try and learn it and for whatever reason never got around to it. Knowing my luck, I will brick my phone.





Celevland,



Rooting allows you to do just about anything to the phone. You can uninstall stock apps, you can overclock, you can install early versiosn of Android 2.2 (Froyo), etc. It's kind of like having full administrative rights to everything on your phone as opposed to being locked out of certain features like we are now. I.E., we can't uninstall some of the stock apps we won't ever use.

[marcus531]

The most important thing you need to understand about rooting your phone is this:



DO NOT ROOT YOUR PHONE (UNLESS YOU HAVE TECHNICAL CONFIDENCE AND AN ACTUAL NEED FOR SOMETHING NOT NORMALLY AVAILABLE)



There are many benefits to a rooted phone ...



But more importantly, to the _casual_ user, those benefits are almost entirely window-dressing and do not materially improve the performance of your phone.



The problem is that in the early _months_, the steps involved are convoluted and invariably one or two steps of a ten or twenty step process risks "bricking" your phone. (Locking the phone so that it is stuck partway through booting up and cannot proceed forward.)



In almost every case that I am aware of, this is recoverable, but non-trivial to do. There are instructions on how to correct these partial-boot states, but these are generally not published this early in the process, so DO NOT PROCEED unless you have 100% confidence that you can do _every_ step perfectly and that you misunderstand AND misjudge _nothing_!



For the Ally, this is the early *days* ... not anywhere near close to months.

The Ally is far from having a bulletproof method compiled and assembled into a granny-proof kit like

1: put THIS_FILE.zip onto an otherwise blank microSD card and put into your Ally

2: download THIS-PROGRAM and run it

3: walk away and come back in two hours, and you will have rooted 2.2 with apps2SD and everything else preinstalled for you on an otherwise blank phone.



Instead, the Ally is at a 16 step process that involves the android debugger and linux commands and many of the things you might othwise want will not work yet (like tethering) ... wait a few weeks and more of the root-benefit things will work out-of-the-box and there should be a granny-proof process shortly thereafter.



BTW if you want root for tethering, but have only a single laptop to tether, just use PDAnet, it's no-root-needed, USB or wifi, free for not-https or $19 for https use.



Also, in certain conditions (like running InstantRoot), rooting does not change your bootloader or base operating system, it CAN be setup as added-programs-only ... so if the warantee issues are with changing the bootloader and OS, these will not interfere.

(Most rooting paradigms involve fully backing up your current bootloader and OS, then putting a custom set on, and are THEORETICALLY reversible ... and many people have undone the rooting of their Android phones, i.e. MotoDroids rooted to 2.1 unrooted back to 2.0.1 in order to upgrade to the official Android 2.1 ... done _right_, with FULL BACKUPS, rooting is fully reversible at any time.)



=-=-=-=-=-=-=



All that said, the future benefits of rooting (generally not available yet, and certainly not trivially) are

(but not limited to)

• COMPLETE backups (unrooted backups are essentially crippled and cannot access data except by asking nicely, cannot backup many apps, and cannot restore apps properly) ... the best-by-far backup is supposed to be TitaniumBackup ... free but root-only (I have not rooted either my Ally nor my wife's MotoDroid, so I can only report that others claim this to be the best)
• ANY application installation to the microSD card at the user's choice (in 2.2, the developer MAY choose to allow this, but the larger / paid programs likely will not)
• tethering as a wifi hotspot for multiple endpoints (but see my comment above about PDAnet for single-device non-rooted tethering)
• modifying the wake-up screen, lock screen, etc
• removal of programs that users typically cannot remove (I don't care about this, but some people feel strongly about it)
• overclocking (aka cooking your motherboard and overraining your battery to run unnecessarily quickly, generally for gaming, but also video)
• pre-installing the next generation of Android OS (2.2) before the LG engineers have made everything work right or Verizon engineers have locked it down tight
• using your linux-based phone as a true linux computer with all of the complexity that sysadmins like me would love and ordinary people would be confused by
• using your USB for USB-host-mode for connecting to outside USB devices (like an ultrasound scanner ... see my previous too-long comments in the other rooting thread that was locked back on June 13)

I could probably try to keep coming up with more reasons, but I am being uxorially summoned

[Jump]

See? I told you guys marcus can leave top-notch postings... when he wants to.Thanks marcus.