While in the process of getting some actual content onto the site, I decided it might be useful to post the answers to some seemingly simple questions that have, in one way or another, managed to give me serious headaches solving recently.
How to Root Your Android Phone: [Specifically, ATT Motorola Atrix Running GingerBread]
Honestly, there are plenty of tutorials on the topic of rooting your android powered phone, and to avoid adding to the noise, here's a link to a decent one by
makeuseof.com. Most of these tutorials work very well on the first try, as they use programs such as
SuperOneClick, which is super simplistic, hides all the nasty details from plain sight, and works for the overwhelming majority of the market by targeting a common exploit. Just follow one of them. It's very difficult to do many things wrong.
However if you're as unlucky as I am, your phone will be a Motorola Atrix system version 4.1.83+ android version 2.2.2+ with ATT as your carrier. These conditions are exactly wrong to get anything productive done, as many of the most popular exploits will not work. And if you are as silly as I am, you'll waste a lot of time wondering why superoneclick's psneuter exploit keeps failing on your device running GingerBread, when there's a simple solution hidden in plain sight: GingerBreak!
Although I have only personally tried this on my own Mototola Atrix, GingerBreak should work on any Android Device running Android's GingerBread OS. The simplest way to go about rooting your phone using the GingerBreak exploit, is to just download and run kennethpenn's tool found
here.
Note: Although, the contents of my internal/external SD Card were unscathed throughout this process, you may want to back up your SD Cards' files just in case.
Rooting Instructions:
1) First make sure your device is in debug mode. Do this by going to Settings->Applications->Development-> and check the box labeled: "Debug Mode when USB is connected".
2) Then simply connect your device to your computer.
3) Now run the exe.
4) It's easy and painless. When the program finishes, it may appear that nothing's happened, but when you check your app drawer, you should be able to find a new app labeled "Ginger Break."
5) The app will remind you, but make sure you have an SD Card mounted, and that USB Debugging is on.
6) Run the app. It will remind you to do step 5.
7) Hit the 'Root' option.
8) Now just wait anywhere between 1-10 minutes (should honestly be less than 2).
9) When the device reboots, this is your sign that the exploit has worked!
10) check your app drawer for an app labeled "Super User." If you see it congrats! Your phone is probably now Rooted!
11) (optional) if you want to confirm that you are rooted, there's a nice app, in the marketplace named
Root Checker by Joey Krim, that will do just that for you.
Nice! Now that you're rooted, there's probably one more thing you'll want to do. If you haven't realized yet, ATT thinks you are stupid, and for your own good, has prevented you from being able to choose whether or not you would like to install apps from anywhere other than the provided marketplace. While it was very polite of them to cripple your phone like this, you might want to fix this anyway. Solution?: GladEnable!
How To Enable Sideloading Using GladEnable:
GladEnable Instructions
The above link is to a short tutorial on the xda-developer's forum, describing how to use it. It's very straightforward.
1) Just download the script provided on the page.
2) Extract the files in the script to C:\GladEnable.
NOTE: This is mandatory.
3) Connect your phone to your PC with USB Debugging On and USB Connection Set to "None" (If you're unsure how to do this, just drag the notification bar down while connected and press the USB Connection option to select your preference).
4) Run the GladEnable.bat file as administrator.
5) Once the program starts in your phone, you will get multiple super user requests, just click allow each time and all should work well.
6) Done! Check if you were successful by going to Settings->Applications, and there should be a check box listed as "Unknown Sources" checked in the menu. Congratulations! You can now sideload!
7) (Optional) However, if you are actually as unlucky as I am, something will have gone wrong. Likely it will be that you will have seen a message something along the lines of "sideloading permission denied something/something/gladenable.sh".
When this happened to me, what the issue was, was that somehow I had managed to miss a super user request (although its more likely that it never actually showed up). To solve this problem, double check that your files were placed properly. "Properly" meaning that the files are located in "C:\GladEnable\" and not "C:\GladEnable\GladEnable\" which may be the default setup depending on how it was extracted. Then reconnect your phone to your PC and try running the bat file again. There should have been 4 initial super user requests, followed by a 5th one later. If you had the same problem I had, when you run it this time, the missing permission request should appear. Hit "allow" and when you finish go back to step 6 to check for success.
Disclaimer:
As per usual, I am not responsible for any negative outcome (e.g. you bricking your phone, or just some process simply not working), although its highly unlikely that anything of that nature should happen without you probably doing something very wrong. I'm just providing another resource that will hopefully help others out with the similar problems that I've encountered.
Hopefully this may help solve any potential headaches out there caused ATT and GingerBread. Thanks for reading!
