Trying Cyanogen Mod android on my HTC Magic

I've been using Android daily since July 23rd. I came to it from a background of being a daily iPod Touch user with a cheapo Huawei 3G ("Vodafone 715") as my phone. I'm conservative when it comes to messing with expensive phones, so I left my first phone unmolested by alternative builds of Android. This week, I bought my second HTC Magic (used - via Trademe) and - that evening - the fun began. By midnight, I had the new phone running Steve Kondik's "Cyanogen" 4.2.5 android instead of the Vodafone / HTC build that had been on it when it arrived.

It took me a while because there there is a lot of information out there and it is frequently fragmented and often months old. Not everyone had the same problem. Some people who had a problem found a way to work around it that didn't work for others.

The first hurdle is getting a working "adb" or "fastboot" connection to the phone that will let you load the files you need onto it and run them with root authority to kick things off. I was almost there with  64-bit Ubuntu, but in the end wasn't able to complete the task due to some permissions issues with UDEV. I could read whatever I liked....but no way was Ubuntu going to let me write to anything on the phone as root.

After a couple of hours of that, I gave Windows Vista a try. Previously, I had no luck at all getting Vista to see the phone. But the system had been re-booted several times since the last attempts and I also made a fresh attempt at installing the USB drivers for the adb interface. I also added a fresh win32 version of fastboot, made sure it was all on the PATH....and suddenly everything worked!

At this point I found I was using an old recovery.img file that wouldn't boot on my phone. I went to Cyanogenmod.com and checked out the instructions there as this was the ROM I wanted to install anyway. What I found was nothing short of awesome.....a set of well-packaged files supported by some clear, simple steps plainly and unambiguously presented.

Following these steps, in a few minutes I had the phone rooted, the original ROM backed up via "Nandroid", the HTC base ROM installed (to get the Google apps) and then a new Cyanogen ROM installed (v4.2.3.1) over the top. I didn't need to do that. I thought I was downloading the latest version - d'oh! Realised today, I had installed an earlier one, working from the instructions.

After re-booting into the brave new world, I flashed the enhanced recovery image v1.4 onto my phone (as suggested) to make any / all future updates easy.

Today, to get to the latest version, I downloaded CMUpdater from the Android market and updated Cyanogen, over the air and on-demand - to v4.5.2. That process took download time (27MB at 180KB/sec over 3G - not long).

I now have voice dialing and USB tethering for Internet and the ability to backup and restore and and all android ROMs  I care to install on my phone.

Coolness was unleashed today.