I love my HTC Desire. I really do. And after having tested a HTC Desire HD for work for a little over a month, I love it even more (my Desire, that is). There’s only one thing I hated to let go when I returned the Desire HD, and that was the 1GB of space for apps. My Desire has only 149MB available, and even with Froyo and App 2 SD, that ain’t enough.
So I’ve been considering installing a custom image for quite some time. But at the same time I’ve been dreading it and putting it off. After all… my phone is working fine now, what if something goes wrong? And finding what ROM to choose isn’t exactly easy.
But tonight I finally decided to take the plunge and do it. I had a migraine earlier in the day, so possibly the medication had some impact on the reasoning circuitry in my brain. At least I decided to Root it for a start. Since I have the memory of an ant on prozac, I’ll record the steps here for my own sake and anyone I’ll start preaching the gospel to.
Rooting for the good guys
I’m not a hardcore android user or a coder. Nor do I have any ambition to be, so I opted for the path of least resistance. For rooting the Desire I used unrevoked 3(.32). I simply downloaded the Windows version, connected my phone in debugging mode, and ran the downloaded file. From then on the app pretty much controlled everything itself, I simply entered the needed codes on each reboot. at one point after the 2nd or 3rd reboot it tried to install drivers for a device but couldn’t find them. While keeping the app running I installed the drivers according to this guide, and and the app simply continued automatically. Easy!
After a little while my Desire was rooted and I could install nifty little utilities such as screenshot apps etc. Other than that, nothing was changed and the phone was just like before. Kind of an anticlimax :-)
So I decided to install an image… ;-)
It’s all about having the right image
For a while I was pretty much set on wanting to install MoDaCo’s image on the phone, but after having browsed some threads in his forum the future commitment seemed a little unclear, and a lot of commenters were being enthusiastic about LeeDroid, so I decided to give that a try after having read up on it.
Since the main point was to get more app space, I was going for the A2SD version. And according to the wiki, to make effective use of that, you first need to partition your SD card with a 512MB ext3 partition. I used ROM Manager on the android, selected 512 for EXT and 0 for swap. Remember, this wipes your SD!
And since I already had ROM Manager there, I decided to use it for creating a backup of my current config, and apply the LeeDroid image. The current version was 2.3d, so I downloaded LeeDrOiD_2.3d_A2SD.zip and copied it to the root of the SD card. Selected it from within ROM Manager, which took care of the rest. A few minutes and reboots later, I had a nice new image that looks and works much like the original sense I had, but so far with much more app space and some nifty additional features on top of that :)
I’ll try to update with my findings… :)
