I’m finally fed up with the crappy performance and battery life of my Samsung Moment.   I decided that I was going to flash to an alternate ROM (and kernel);   The guys at the office are both on Epics and have root and recovery but not much else.  I’m not after Froyo here, though the 2.2 JVM would be nice.  Read on to find out how the rooting went…

So the first step to rooting my moment was to flash it back to a stock DE03 (Current is DI something, IIRC) image “With Recovery”, according to directions found here. The current recovery is  3.1.1, as of this post.  Recovery is pretty cool in that it gives you something like GRUB, if you hold some keys down as the phone powers on.  For SDXRecovery, that key combo is “VolDown+Send+End/Power”; Note that this is different than the Epic.  (I only know this because Seth was helping me, and he’s more familiar with the Epic).

The trick to getting the cable flashing process going was that the CL14 flasher needed a patch applied.  I can’t find the link at the moment, but it was available through SDX someplace.  Install that and everything is smooth sailing.

So once I had the recovery/loader installed, I went ahead and flashed (still using the cable process, though I wouldn’t have had to) one of the more generic 2.1 ROMs (though that’s not really important).  Following that, I loaded a custom SDX ROM over the top;  I chose the “kronenpj-sdx-v6″ kernel, since I do want VPN support, eventually.  I didn’t do any customization options (though in retrospect, I wish I would have loaded the louZiffer WiFi Tether.  I used the section at the bottom to uninstall most of Sprint’s bloatware.

After it was all done,  I’m pretty happy with the end result.  Battery life seems marginally better (though it’s hard to tell, since it’s been on and off the charger all day) and it’s definitely much more responsive.  Only time will tell how it really fares.  Overall, the reduction clutter alone was worth the 90 minutes I spent on this project.

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Projects, Technology by Kevin