Last night I got sick enough of running out of room for apps on my Aria that I finally decided to just install Froyo. Froyo, along with many other cool features, has a way to install apps to the SD card where there is plenty more room than on the phone itself. The process was way easier than I thought it would be, and after using it for a few hours seems just as stable (to me anyway) as the stock OS. These are the steps that I took to get Froyo installed:
1) Root the phone with Unrevoked3: http://unrevoked.com/recovery/ I ran this from Linux with no problem.. didn’t have to do anything other than start the application and plug the phone in.
2) Created a backup by following the steps here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_backup_or_recover_via_Nandroid (Note, the button combo for Aria to boot into recovery mode was holding down the VOLUME DOWN while pressing the power key while off.
3) From the menu, after backing up everything: Wipe Data
4) Wipe Dalvik Cache
5) Download the liberated_aria_FR007_signed.zip rom from here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=819715 and copied it to my SD card.
6) Boot up in recovery again and installed ROM from SD.
7) Booted Froyo! There were a couple additional steps to get the apps to the SD card, they are detailed in the thread from step 5.
Couple of notes: I suppose that I could have recovered my apps from a backup, but I didn’t, I just downloaded them from the Market again. Everything else that I needed (contacts/calendar/etc) were all stored in the cloud and were there again after setting up my google account. Don’t forget to read as much as you need to of the instructions.. I’m sure that I’m leaving out some detail that is covered there.
Thanks to everyone from forum.xda-developers.com and unrevoked for making this possible!
Thanks for the info, I have an Aria on order and it sounds like they may not be releasing Froyo for it. I plan to wait atleast a month or so before I put a custom rom on there but if they do not upgrade, and I am sure it won’t get Gingerbread for a year or more (if ever) so I am pretty sure I will go down this road sometime.
Related question, did you do any sideloading from Linux before you upgraded? If so, how? I see a lot of information on doing it via Windows but the requirement of a driver is the only step there seems to be missing with Linux (I use Ubuntu). Thanks.
Daniel, I did not do any sideloading from Linux before. I did make a partial attempt to at one point but discovered that my workstatoin’s glibc was too outdated to run the sdk tools necessary for it. It did not sound overly complicated, but I was not in the mood to rebuild everything and upgrade glibc. I happily ran the stock Aria Android OS for months and never really ran into a situation where I thought it would be necessary, which is unusual for me because I love to tinker. But after reading about how simple Unrevoked3 makes rooting (literally one-click) from my linux box and trying it for myself, I wish that I had done it in the very beginning. I highly recommend it.. even if you are not upgrading to 2.2, just to root the device and take control. Shortly after writing this post I gave CM6 a try instead of FR007 and have decided to keep it. CM6 is way awesome, I even have a live wallpaper on my Aria now.