Bake your own custom rom for android device

HEY GUYS.....

You know you’re a hardcore Android user when you buy a new smartphone and your first thought is to see if there’s a CyanogenMod ROM available for it yet. Custom ROMs have become a bit of an underground industry as users worldwide look to try and ditch the corporate bloatware and create a lean phone experience.

Generally, there are two ways you can create a custom ROM for your phone: you can start from scratch with AOSP or you can build on an official stock ROM and customise it yourself. AOSP is a lot of work, so props to CyanogenMod for the work it does, but we’re going to look at how to create a custom ROM from a stock release and at the same time, introduce you to the Kitchen.

Customising a ROM is a complicated process on one level, but on another, it’s like working on a multi-layer ZIP file. In a nutshell, you extract a ROM’s contents out of its archive into a working folder, remove the ROM parts you don’t want (the bloatware) and make any other changes you want (root access, for example), stitch the ROM back up and archive it. Android Kitchen isn’t going to turn you into a ROM god overnight, but even if you never actually flash your phone with your own customised ROM, it’ll still open up the world of ROM development and give you a taste of how Android works underneath

You’ll need this-

Android Kitchen - xda-developers.com has all the info you need.

Vmware Player 5 - grab the latest version 

Xubuntu - get the 32-bit 13.04 ISO image or Fedora 19,20

Building the platform

Before we start, the first thing we need is a development platform — Android Kitchen is a Java-based Linux console app that works in Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. To use Windows, you need to create a Cygwin environment first. Cygwin is a set of tools that creates something of a Linux environment and includes a Linux API (application programming interface) to allow some low-level Linux code to run under Windows. As Cygwin itself is keen to point out, it’s not a way to make Windows aware of Linux’s peculiar ways or to run Linux apps natively on Windows.

Installing Android Kitchen

When you’re ready, the next step is to install the Android Kitchen and we’ll be working exclusively within the VM from now on.

The first step is to launch the ‘Ubuntu Software Center’ and in the search box on the top-right, type Java . Select the latest ‘OpenJDK Java Runtime’ option and install it. When it’s done, launch a Terminal box (‘Menu > Accessories > Terminal Emulator’) and type java –version to ensure it’s installed. Launch your Linux browser and head over to Android Kitchen on GitHub to download the latest version of the ROM Kitchen (at the time of writing, this was version 0.224). Click on the zip icon and download it — it’ll be about 27MB and should make its way to your /home/<username>/download/ folder.

Finding ROMs(well be using samsung device for an example)

Before we can start cooking ROMs, we need a ROM to start with. Just for this example, we’ll use the latest Android Jelly Bean (4.1.2) ROM for the Galaxy S II I9100 smartphone. If you have a Samsung phone,Sammobile is about the best place to grab stock ROMs. The sample ROM file we’re using as it was downloaded is ‘i9100xwlsh_i9100opslsb_ops.zip’. Copy that file to your /home/<username>/downloads/ folder.

Now we get to a slight bump in the road. There are a number of ways phone ROM archives can turn up and you have to treat each one differently. Most Samsung ROMs come as ZIP files with a ‘.TAR.MD5’ archive inside. Grab this file and copy it to the Kitchen’s ‘original_update’ subfolder. Use the Thunar file manager to rename the file and drop the ‘.MD5’ extension, so it just becomes a TAR file.

Head back to the Terminal with the Kitchen app running and select ‘Option 1’ — we need to create a working folder for our customised ROM. Use the default working folder option provided and press the Enter key to continue. Android Kitchen should then show your ROM file in its list of ‘Available ROMs’. Select the ROM number and press Enter. Android Kitchen will begin expanding the ROM into the working folder, ready for us to start customising.

When it’s done, you’ll have the option to see an information panel about the ROM, including whether it already has root access and other useful extras.

This article shall be continued.....This article is just a brief intro to customizing your own rom....ALL THE BEST