Bake your own custom rom for android device PART 2

Welcome back guys...

In the first article, we looked at building the platform,installing the android kitchen and finding appropriate roms.Please refer to the previous article .

We won’t go over the whole thing again, but the idea is that even though the Android Kitchen app we use requires Linux, you can do all of this on a Windows computer by creating and working inside a Linux virtual machine.

Finally, be aware that Android Kitchen doesn’t support ROMs for every Android device — you can find the compatibility list and the app’s home thread over at XDA Developers Forum.

So lets continue,

The very last thing we did in part 1 was look at how to grab a ROM file for a Galaxy S2 smartphone and how to get the Android Kitchen to disassemble it into a working folder.

Remember that Android Kitchen is a Python-language/Java-powered script that allows you to take an existing ROM, pull it apart, make changes and stitch it back together again so you can load it into your compatible phone or tablet. This time, we’re going to switch over to Samsung’s Galaxy S3. Samsung’s ROMs for the Galaxy S3 certainly aren’t small — they measure up at around 1.2GB, so it’s no wonder there isn’t quite as much internal storage available as you might have thought.

I'm taking samsung roms because these devices are easy to manipulate with .Plus i'm comfortable working with with samsung devices.

Getting the right ROM file

In some ways, the most complicated part of the process of creating a custom ROM is actually finding the right ROM file — not just the right ROM for your particular Android device, but the right archive file in that ROM download. For Android Kitchen to work, what we need is the basic ROM TAR file. TAR is roughly the Linux equivalent of an ISO image in Windows — it’s a single file archive containing lots of files inside it, but it retains the file system of those files. However, sometimes you’ll find ROM TAR files stored as ‘TAR.MD5’ files, which Android Kitchen can’t recognise. The solution is nice and simple — just drop the ‘.MD5’ bit with a simple rename in the Thunar file explorer so that you end up with a TAR file again and you should be fine. That file needs to be copied to your /home/<username>/kitchen/original_update/ subfolder. Remember that Android Kitchen can’t work if your username has spaces in it. You must move the kitchen file path to /home/ instead. 

With the ROM TAR file in the right location, you can launch Android Kitchen (open a Terminal inside the /kitchen folder and run ./menu ) and select option ‘1’ to create the working folder from your ROM. Follow the basic prompts (you’ll need your username’s password) and when you’re done, you’ll get an info panel on what extra features are inside your ROM.

Now that you’re set up, the first thing you’ll want to do if you’re customising your own ROM is to give it root access. Root access allows apps to access the root folder of the Android operating system to perform extra features not normally allowed by Android. For example, you need it if you want to run Samba Filesharing, or if you want to connect your PlayStation 3 DualShock gamepad to your phone via Bluetooth. You may just want it because you don’t like being locked out of your own phone.

There is a security downside in that if you can get to the root folder of your phone, so can any rogue app . However, it’s one of the ‘use at your own risk’ features of most custom ROMs like CyanogenMod.

When you’re ready to add root access to your ROM, press ‘2’ on the main menu. As soon as you do, you have to decide which superuser app you want installed. Superuser is essentially an app that allows you to control how other apps interact with your root access. The most common option you see in custom ROMs is the app named Superuser, although this free version is fairly limited. The alternative is called SuperSU and is more for Android fanatics, with more options and some nice extras including claimed greater notification speed.

If you’re just after the ability to run apps that need root access, Superuser is fine and all you’ll need. If you’re a more serious user, give SuperSU a go. To make your choice in Android Kitchen, press C for SuperSU or D for Superuser.

To be continued