Root Your Android device #2

Hey there,

(This is just to clarify confusing terms)

Some people dont root there phones because they find it extremely complicated or dont understand the terms well, or are too afraid to take chances.

Well below i have explained a few terms which are normally used by android “FREAKS”

So when the first time you try rooting you’ll come across some “wierd terms”,

So lets get clear about what they are,

1. Rooting
2. Jailbreaking
3. Rom
4. NAND and Nandroid
5. Operating System
6. Mod(e.g. Cyanogenmod)
7. Recovery(ClockworkMod, Amon Ra)
8. Custom Kernel(e.g.Siyah Kernel->provides dual boot opt)
9. Firmware
10. Driver
11. Over The Air(OTA)
12. Fastboot
13. Flashing

So this is the basic list, if ive missed out any more confusing terms just let me know.

Ive already explained rooting, just refer to post #1 rooting android phone.

Rooting and Jailbreaking are essentially the same things, Jailbreaking is the iPhone users' word for what Android users call Rooting. Rooting is when you gain "Root" access to the phone giving you the power to do anything you want to it. Normally you're prevented from being Root for your own good, as it's very easy to break your phone once you have root access, and quite hard to break it without.

A Nandroid backup is a backup of your phone that is an exact image of the state of your phone. So you could make an exact copy of your current phone, then do major changes to it, and then restore to your previous backup by flashing the backup back to the phone. 

Flashing means to copy or to install.... you are essentially wiping the device and restoring a previous state (a backup) or you are flashing a new ROM. NAND is your device's flash storage, which is why copying files there is called "flashing".

The Android operating system is the software that manages the hardware in an Android phone such as the screen, data communications, storage, camera and GPS. It provides a common layer that allows applications the use of and access to these resources on a range of different devices without the app having to know anything special about the actual hardware that it is running on. The Android Operating System also includes a number of standard apps and services such as the Contacts, Camera, Photo Gallery and web browser apps and allows the user to do such things as control the screen brightness or connect to wifi networks.

Although the real definitions are different, in the Android world, ROM, Mod, Custom Kernel andFirmware are all used as if they mean essentially the same thing. They all refer to a customised version of the Android operating system that has been modified to work on a particular brand of phone with a specific set of customisations or changes. This can be done so that an old phone like the SGGS2 can be given a brand new version of Android, such as give it the XPERIA Z look, even if the manufacturer has decided not to provide it. Or could be to provide extra functionality not available in the manufacturer's supplied version of Android, or to fix problems in the manufacturer supplied version.

A Driver is what tells the Android software operating system how to talk to all the different hardware that is in an Android phone. When someone is putting together a ROM for a particular phone model they will need to include of all that phone's drivers inside the ROM (for things like the cellular modem, WiFi access, the particular camera type, the specific processor, etc) otherwise the ROM either won't work on that phone, or will only be able to work certain parts of the phone and, for instance, may not be able to use the front-facing camera, or may not be able to connect to a WiFi network. This is exactly the same as when you plug something new into Windows and it runs the New Hardware Added wizard and goes looking for a new driver before you can use it.

An Over The Air (OTA) update is when your phone receives an update to its Android operating system "over the air", ie it is sent the files automatically over the cellular network from either Google or from your phone network without ever needing to be plugged into a PC. This contrasts with the way that, for example, the iPhone is updated where it has to be physically plugged into a computer running iTunes to get its updates.

The bootloader controls how the device boots. Google's PC-side tool for getting into the bootloader and other related tasks is called Fastboot, and running the bootloader interactively may be called "Fastboot mode". A locked bootloader will verify the Android system partition and restore it to stock if it doesn't match, whereas an unlocked bootloader doesn't do the same checking, which is why unlocking the bootloader is required to permanently root a device.

The bootloader may also play some part in flashing firmware, though this is usually part of recovery. While you normally don't want to mess with the bootloader, advanced users will often flash a custom recovery like ClockworkMod (though a locked bootloader may prevent this). This allows one to flash firmware that hasn't been signed by the manufacturer (such as custom ROMs), since stock recovery usually checks for the signature, and do advanced tasks like complete Nandroid backups. Recovery is a bit like the BIOS boot screen on PCs in that you get to it by pressing a special combination of buttons as the phone starts up. Recovery can also do things like run an update file from the phone's SD card, or let you connect from a PC via ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to manage the device from the command line.

CREDITS- MBPV