Root noob'd - will rooting do what I want?

[Faber]

I recently broke the screen on my Nexus 1. With my insurance, TMobile would only replace my Nexus 1 with a Vibrant. I wasn't pleased with this, as I've become very accustomed to the "Vanilla" Android experience, but c'est la vie it couldn't be helped. So, I want to get back to that vanilla experience. Will rooting let me achieve those ends? Can I upgrade to gingerbread via rooting? Or is rooting for something else entirely? I'm asking because I'm not sure I understand the parameters of rooting.

 

[snapper.fishes]

Nope. There's nothing you can do at all to get back to stock vanilla. There are only two roms out there that will get rid of Touchwiz, namely MIUI and CM7, and neither of them are strictly vanilla android. (Though CyanogenMod comes quite close to it).

All rooting does is give you administrator privilege, nothing more. It allows you to access core file, but to actually modify the rom you need to flash a new rom through either Odin or CWM, and neither of that requires root.

 

[Faber]

Just to be clear - I don't need to root before installing CM7?

Also, any idea what the current version of CM7 happens to be? I poured over the XDA-dev forums and found a release from 4/11 and yet I've seen mention of a better release somewhere between 4/19 and 4/21. It doesn't appear to be on the XDA forums and the CyanogenMod website doesn't appear to host or even link to releases (from what I can tell thus far). So, any help would be appreciated.

 

[Faber]

Nevermind, I finally figured out where to grab the most recent update from the CyanogenMod website.