Root [International] Newbie coming on board!

[noisydroid]

Good afternoon fellow droids,

So I am new here (as my post count would suggest) as I recently made the big switch. I got fed up with the lack of power in the iPhone, so I sold it, and got me an S3.

I have been scouring the forums for a couple of days now, and quite frankly, I am shocked; maybe even a bit intimidated! I was all over jailbreaking, tweaking, ssh'ing, etc when I had my iPhone, and now, I find myself completely out of the tech world even since I carried this phone.

I have no clue what you mean by installing an AKOP ROM or different customs ROM's for different usage.

What is this droid and what is it all about? I know that this might be annoying for some users, but hey, I am an active member of many forums and always take the time to help out newbies. So...can someone refer me to some kind of a welcome package post for 100% newbies.

Thank you for stopping by!


P.S: First issue I faced is the phone wouldn't connect to a friends wifi network. Any goes as to why this happened?

Another issue I've faced (no luck in search) is being able to fire up proxy authentication in the wifi settings menu. My workplace network is proxy protected and I can't seem to get thru it EXCEPT when using the browser (which asks me for authorization). I remember in the iPhone there was a place where I can put my proxy user and pass and all is fine. Someone please help here.

 

[CafeKampuchia]

Welcome aboard, Noisydroid :hello: As you've noticed, the Android world is much larger and flexible than Apple's. Once you get your arms around this stuff, you'll never go back.

I'll answer your first question. A ROM is the OS of your phone. It starts life as a stock Android OS like ICS or Jelly Bean and then the phone manufacturer brands it my making modifications sometimes called skinning. HTC's version is called Sense and Samsung calls theirs TouchWiz. Both are Android and work the same, but there are differences as well.

But some people aren't satisfied with TouchWiz on their GS3 and want stock ICS like on a Nexus device. That requires a custom rom usually developed by the user community. Other groups take stock android stuff and give it their own tweaks (AOKP, AOSP, CyanogenMod). It's also popular to port roms from other devices. The only way to know what you'll like is to flash the various roms and try them out.

Hope that helps.

 

[SUroot]

To expand on Cafe's already sufficient answer...

AOSP stands for Android Open Source Project. This is the source code project for android. If you downloaded and "built" the source code directly from google's source code repository (online storage location), you would have a vanilla android (Plain google) ROM, that would work directly on a Google Galaxy Nexus.

All manufacturers, like mentioned, start with AOSP and HEAVILY modify it to give it a proprietory interface (Touchwiz, Sense, Timescape etc) which gives each manufacturer a unique advantage over the competition. To protect this advantage, these User Interfaces are so deeply engrained in Android that they will not work on other android devices. They rely on the Android Kernel and something called the Frameworks to be exclusive to that brand. Essenetially the brand owns the code they inject in android to make it different.

You could become a ROM developer using the AOSP code. You could download it and build it with specific files (drivers, kernel etc) for the SGS3. This would be a Vanilla build like the Galaxy Nexus, but only compatible with the SGS3. This would be very difficult though, I am just citing it as an example.

There are other teams of developers that release ROMs based on AOSP but like manufacturers, heavily Modify them. For example, the CyanogenMod team start with AOSP and make it their own. Unlike manufacturers, their injected code is NOT proprietory. It is open source (as android is meant to be) and anyone with the knowledge could use it to make it better.

Another example of a development team like Cyanogen is "AOKP". After Android Open Kang Project. A self given name to an AOSP based project.

I hoper this helps a little further to explain.

 

[noisydroid]

Wow guys. Thanks for the detailed explanations. It helped me out a lot. Well my first tweak was rooting my phone. It went ok, better than I expected.

Two more:

1) How easily can you brick your phone and what are the main causes of bricking?

2) I been hearing a lot of people speaking of "flashing" ROM's etc. In my world flashing means resetting something back to stock. If they are custom ROM's why would you do that?

 

[SUroot]

Wow guys. Thanks for the detailed explanations. It helped me out a lot. Well my first tweak was rooting my phone. It went ok, better than I expected.

Two more:

1) How easily can you brick your phone and what are the main causes of bricking?

2) I been hearing a lot of people speaking of "flashing" ROM's etc. In my world flashing means resetting something back to stock. If they are custom ROM's why would you do that?

In my world (The IT world), Flashing means "to install onto flash memory". It does also mean that in the android world. It should mean that in all worlds.

It may be that in your world, flashing it also overwrites data (settings etc) giving it a "reset" effect

 

[CafeKampuchia]

1) How easily can you brick your phone and what are the main causes of bricking?

During rooting, rarely happens. While flashing a ROM or whatever, "soft bricking" happens a lot and is recoverable by rebooting into recovery and reflashing using ODIN. Hard-bricking (not recoverable) is really hard with a Samsung product.

I've softbricked my HTC Wildfire S more times than I can count. I'd just boot back into ClockworkMod Recovery and backup a previously working nandroid. I've never soft-bricked my Galaxy Tab 8.9, but wouldn't be afraid if it happened because I've also installed ClockworkMod Recovery and backed up its ROM. Next, I'm off to root the G3