Newb seeks simple breakdown

[theDmanVR6]

So after about two days of searching and searching the forum i have succumb to posting this very newb like thread.

I am looking for someone to just very simply and very nicely define and explain what exactly ROMS, KERNELS, FLASHING and other technical keywords are when it comes to the HTC Droid Incredible root or hacking process.

Now i originally got on this forum because i wanted to find a way to get rid of the useless and never used apps that came with my Incredible. After doing some heavy googleing i found that rooting the phone was the only way to do this. So i got on here and found an extremely helpful and informative step by step guide to rooting the phone. I do have to give credit to forum member "enlightened" for writing up a great tutorial. I followed it to the t and was successful at rooting the phone using unrEVOked 3.32 on stock 2.2.

But now that i have a rooted phone and more space on it whats next? Ive been reading and seeing that a lot of people are talking about ROMS and KERNELS and flashing roms and custom themes and just talking a lot of jargon that i quite dont understand yet. I am new to this whole phone rooting business but NOT a tech newb by any means. So i dont need the replies telling me "if you need to ask then dont do it" or any condescending replies for that matter. I have noticed that there are a lot of first time phone hackers that im sure have all the same questions i do, but are afraid to ask. One of the main things i want to do is customize the UI of my phone and any cool things that i don't even know about. So if anyone is nice out there and wants to help us newbs out, that would be great. Sorry this is so lengthy but i had to get it out

 

[OlafTheOx]

I know your pain. Went through much of it myself over the past 10 months.

ROM - custom flavor of the Android operating system. HTC phones have Sense, Motorola phones have Motoblur, Samsung have ??? Independent developers have created their own ROMs and released them for public consumption. Some are Sense based, others are AOSP based (Android Open Source Project) also called vanilla Android.

A kernel is the part of the operating system that controls the hardware when commands are executed. Flashing a different kernel to your phone can make it faster, use less battery power, provide new capabilities (i.e. overclocking the processor), etc. It can also bugger up your phone, so be careful with these, and always perform (before you do anything else) a

Nandroid Backup - complete backup of your ROM, apps, and data.


DInc with CyanogenMod 6.1