This is the instructions that ended up working flawlessly to root my G1, install JesusFreke’s 1.51 T-Mobile US ROM,  and setup AppstoSD.  I must’ve wiped my phone about a half-dozen times and spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to make this work the way it was supposed to.  (By the way,  thank you Krista,  for convincing me to get a G1 over a Blackberry Bold.  I love this phone.)

Androidandme has a great guide to root your phone which I’ve condensed here – and stripped out everything that didn’t work for me.

First backed up all of my data using MyBackup Pro ($4.99 in Market) and saved it to my SD card.

Hooked the phone up to my system and mounted,  then copied over all my pictures,  videos,  and backups.

• Click the notification on your phone that says “USB Connected”.  Select the “Mount” option.

Formatted the entire SD card using FAT32 (do not use Quick Format).

• Right click Removable Disk and select Format.
• Select FAT32 for the file system,  then click Start

Once the disk is done formatting,  download DREAIMG.nbh.  You can do this with the root application below,  but this always downloaded corrupted over 3G & Edge (I did both, several times) and wasted a bunch of time.  I’ve uploaded a copy of RC29 DREAIMG.nbh to my Dropbox account.

• DREAIMG.nbh http://bit.ly/wfAOO (90mb)
• Copy DREAIMG.nbh onto the SD card root (don’t put it into a folder) through the USB mount.
• After the copy finishes, right click Removable Disk and choose Eject.
• Disconnect the USB cable from your phone.

Now we’re going to wipe the phone entirely (make sure you’ve used MyBackup Pro,  or Nandroid before doing this,  seriously) and install RC29 with the exploitable root hole.

• Power off your phone by holding the red ‘end talk’ button (Power) down, and choosing Power Off
• Hold the Camera button down,  and power the phone back with the Power button
• Once the bootloader fully loads,  press the Power button to start update
• When completed press the trackball (Action Key) to continue
• Reboot the phone by pressing Talk, Menu, Power at the same time
• Go through the steps to setup a fresh install of Android

Now download the root script here from the Android browser: http://bit.ly/L9ast (Leads to: http://www.androidactivity.com/root/root.apk)

Tap on the root.apk in your browser download list,  it will notify you that this program needs to be allowed because it is a non-Market application.  Click the provided Settings button and allow non-Market apps.  Hit the back button,  then tap the root.apk download to install.

Now there are two ways to do this,  both worked for me,  but I’m paranoid of downloading critical updates OTA at this point.

• OTA: Run the root.apk in your apps list and tap Step2:  Download IMG and HardSPL files to get the recovery files.
  • or
• Direct: Download the IMG and HardSPL files directly on your computer,  and copy onto the root of your SD card with a USB mount.
  • Recovery (2.7MB) [recovery.img] – http://bit.ly/K7FXI
  • HardSPL (177k) [update.zip] – http://bit.ly/qdm7P

Once the files are downloaded onto your SD card’s root perform these steps.

• Go to the home screen and open up your keyboard.
• Hit enter, pause a second, then hit enter again.
• Type telnetd in all lower case minus the quotes. Ignore the contact search that comes up.
• Press enter again.

Now run the root.apk application and tap Step3: Protect your root.  This will root your phone with the SPL upgrade.  Any errors means telnetd is not running,  so go back and do those steps again.  Now we need to reboot the phone again and run the update.zip on the SD card.

• Hold the Power button down and choose “Power Off”
• Hold the Home button down and the Power button until the phone turns back on
• When the yellow warning sign appears,  hit ALT+S on the keyboard
• When finished reboot the phone by pressing Talk, Menu, Power at the same time

Last step before adding the custom build is updating the radio to support Android 1.5.

• Download the radio update (9mb) [update.zip] – http://bit.ly/102Ndj
• Plug your phone into your computer and mount USB
• Copy update.zip onto the root of the SD card (overwrite or remove previous files if still there)

• Hold the Power button down and choose “Power Off”
• Hold the Home button down and the Power button until the phone turns back on
• When the yellow warning sign appears,  hit ALT+S on the keyboard
• When finished reboot the phone by pressing Talk, Menu, Power at the same time

Time to update to a custom build of Android.  I went with JesusFreke’s 1.51 US build,  which has the T-Mobile apps built in.

• Download the JF 1.51 update (36mb) [JFv1.51_CRB43-US.zip] – http://jf.andblogs.net/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=14
• Plug your phone into your computer and mount USB
• Rename JFv1.51_CRB43-US.zip to update.zip
• Copy update.zip onto the root of the SD card (overwrite or remove previous files if still there)

• Hold the Power button down and choose “Power Off”
• Hold the Home button down and the Power button until the phone turns back on
• When the yellow warning sign appears,  hit ALT+L to display loader
• Press ALT+W to perform a factory wipe [Thanks to David for pointing this out in the comments,  ran into the same issue on a friend's G1 and a wipe prior resolved.]
• Once wipe finishes,  press ALT+S to load update.zip
• When finished reboot the phone by pressing Talk, Menu, Power at the same time

Alright.  Now you’re running a custom Android build.  Other builds are available as well,  here’s a few resources in case you’re curious (the steps are the same to install those instead).  Haykuro & The Dude both have their own builds,  and you can download different JF versions at his blog.

Before doing anything else I highly suggest running configuring your Apps and Cache to run off of your SD card – the whole reason I went through all of the nonsense above is because I screwed my installation up trying to do this after I already had my phone pretty loaded with stuff.  Without AppstoSD eventually your G1 will run like absolute crap as the memory dwindles down and it can be pretty frustrating.

• Format your SD card one more time to FAT32 just to be safe
• Download this zip containing a2sd.sh and init.rc – (1k) [a2sd.zip] – http://bit.ly/3QXx1
• Unpack a2sd.zip to your SD card’s root
• Start the Terminal Emulator and type:
  • su
  • cp /sdcard/init.rc /data/
  • cp /sdcard/a2sd.sh /data/
• Reboot your phone

Now install the AppstoSD2 application created by MarcusMaximus

• Go here in the Android browser to install – (68k) [AppstoSD2.apk] - http://bit.ly/18jVr7
• Choose the amount you want to partition your card,  I did around 500-600MB,  doubt you’ll need even that much.  Whatever you do,  don’t go past 1.5GB.
  • It might take a minute – do not restart/power off your phone,  just wait.  It’ll eventually reboot on it’s own. [Update: I've been told that it might not reboot automatically and the app will give a 'reboot now' button instead,  I haven't seen this myself,  drop me a line in the comments or on twitter if it does!]

• After the reboot run AppstoSD2 and press Copy Apps to SD

• Start the Terminal Emulator and type:
  • su
  • mkdir /system/sd/app-private
  • mkdir /system/sd/dalvik-cache
• Reboot one last time

You’re done!  If you check the Settings it should say that you have however much space you made your Ext2 partition as available system memory – and your phone should never lag.

Restart firefox,  it’s good to go.  Tested it with Wordle and GoToMyPC and didn’t have any issues at all – every other Java install method I’ve used hasn’t worked.

Installed & tested on:  Ubuntu 8.10,  9.04,  9.10 Alpha 2

• sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
• killall firefox

Started Firefox back up again and was able to click the link he sent me – viewed just fine. Love how easy it is in this version of Ubuntu.

First thing I did was go and get Bootchart, “a tool for performance analysis and visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process”. Bootchart is easy enough to install,  and unpacks at 51mb:

• sudo apt-get install bootchart

Wandered over to the bootchart documentation to see if there was anything special I ought to know about and realized I’m using Ubuntu… none of this is necessary.  Simply install and restart.

• sudo shutdown -r now

Once restarted,  you’ll want to check out /var/log/bootchart for the png files with the bootchart output.  Here’s an example from my 8.04.2 test machine I’ve been working with today.

Ubuntu 8.04.2 bootchart

Ubuntu 8.10 bootchart

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 bootchart

For added awesome, since I have Dropbox running on my work ubuntu, work XP, and home ubuntu installations I was able to do this to get the .png over to my WinXP while writing this post:

cp /var/log/bootchart/*.png /home/kyle-test/Dropbox/Public

By the time I had turned back to XP Dropbox had already synced, and I was able to right click the uploaded PNG and choose Dropbox -> Public link, send a copy to my friend, and upload here into the post with absolute minimum effort. I’ll also have the file for comparison when I get home and do the same thing on 8.10.

Once I’ve learned enough to sufficiently decode this I’ll make another post explaining what each thing is and what can be configured/removed to make boot times faster.

In a nutshell, my HP dx5150 here at work boots in 30 seconds.

[UPDATE 6-20-09 4:36pm]
Just ran another bootchart on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 on my main machine – dropped from 24 seconds to 15, probably due to ext4 being the main filesystem.

[UPDATE 1-28-09 12:28am]
Finally got around to getting bootchart up on the 8.10 installation at home,  this one clocks in at 24 seconds!  Taking a look between the two it seems as if hard drive throughput is my biggest limiter – I only dropped 6 seconds on total boot time and this machine is at least 5 times as powerful as the dx 5150 at work.

• sudo apt-get install xchat
• wget http://mircryption.sourceforge.net/Downloads/mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• wget http://voobar.follvalsch.de/files/mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2
• unzip mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• tar -xvf mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2 -C /src
• cd /src/mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha
• mv Makefile ../ && mv dh1080 ../ && mv mircryption.cpp ../
• cd ..

Ran into this error on install and realized I hadn’t installed a compiler since reinstallation. There actually is no readme.txt and no .so file was created.

Trying to install mircryption.so into ~/.xchat2 (see readme.txt for more info)
cp mircryption.so ~/.xchat2
cp: cannot stat `mircryption.so’: No such file or directory
make: *** [install] Error

• sudo apt-get install g++
• make install
• xchat

On first load mircryption will have you set a masterpass phrase.  /setkey <key> sets your key.  Oh yes,  and you’ll want to remove everything afterwards…

• cd ..
• rm -R src/ README.txt mircryption_xchatsrc.zip mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2

i386 instructions:

• sudo apt-get install xchat
• wget http://mircryption.sourceforge.net/Downloads/mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• unzip mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• cd /src/xchat
• make linux
• make install
• cd ../..
• rm -R src/ README.txt mircryption_xchatsrc.zip

• cp /etc/apt/sources.list sources.list.bak
• sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Paste the following at the bottom of the file (for 8.04 change intrepid to hardy):

deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu intrepid main

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox
• killall nautilus

For Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

* (cp /etc/apt/sources.list sources.list.bak ; cat sources.list.bak ; echo “deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu intrepid main” ; echo “deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu intrepid main”) > sources.list.done && sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list sources.list.bak && sudo mv sources.list.done /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox && killall nautilus

Haha… went a little overboard here, don’t know what I was thinking. Don’t drink and linux!

A blue box icon should appear in the icon tray, right click and choose “Start Dropbox” to login or create an account and choose where the Dropbox folder will reside.

(Update for Hardy Heron) – My work test machine was installed originally as 8.04, so I changed the above to match:

* (cp /etc/apt/sources.list sources.list.bak ; cat sources.list.bak ; echo “deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu hardy main” ; echo “deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu hardy main”) > sources.list.done && sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list sources.list.bak && sudo mv sources.list.done /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox && killall nautilus

Worked fine. =)