CyanogenMod

[Caliga]

Ok, I have a Motorola Atrix 4G (MB860), and Motorola just went back on its promise to roll ICS out to this phone.

So first of all, when my contract is up next year I'll definitely be looking at the iPhone and other non-Motorola Android units.  But second of all, now I'm interested in rooting my phone and playing around with things like CyanogenMod, which IIRC makes possible both ICS and Jellybean for the Atrix 4G.

Anyone ever messed around with stuff like this?  I'm comfortable flashing firmware (have done it tons on my PCs and routers) but I don't know how similar this would be to that.

[MadBurgerMaker]

Yeah, I've got it on my Nook Color, but I've never put it on a phone and don't know how different it might be.  On the NC, I'm able to just use an SD card as a Cyanogen boot disk-thing, so if I don't want it anymore, I just take it out.  It's a pretty cool way to test some shit out and see what it's like before putting it on there "for real" if you're able to do that with your phone.

E:  I basically just followed the directions from nookdevs.com to do it, but there were lots of places that had them (androidforums.com was another one, I believe).  Look around and see how easy it is.

[Caliga]

I dunno if you can, but you do need to have an SD (microSDHC in my case) in order to flash the OS, so I'll have to run out and get one.  It looks like those are pretty cheap now, so no biggie.

[Caliga]

I was able to successfully get ICS onto my Atrix, but as it turns out since ICS-level drivers have never been released by Motorola for the Atrix MB860, the camera is broken and apps which are dependent on ICS in order to work properly (i.e. Chrome for Android) don't seem to work properly either.

Hopefully Motorola will release the drivers since they have dropped ICS development, because ICS looks/feels awesome on the Atrix.  Until then, I downgraded to a Cyanogenmod 7 fork called MROM that looks really nice--it's still Gingerbread but has some of the ICS look-and-feel, lacks the Moto bloatware, and (maybe for that reason) is alot faster and consumes less battery.

[derspiess]

I run Cyanogen on my Nook Color and my old Evo 4G.  Great-performing & less-bloated and if the energy-saving features work as they're supposed to it's great on battery life.  But sometimes a process will freeze and it will forget to put the device into sleep mode.

I haven't tried it on my new Evo 4G LTE yet but I did root-- I'm running a ROM that is based on the stock HTC ROM (ICS/4.0.4).

[Caliga]

The Moto proprietary drivers for the Atrix have been leaked, so development is ongoing for fully-functional versions of ICS and JB.

[derspiess]

The Moto proprietary drivers for the Atrix have been leaked, so development is ongoing for fully-functional versions of ICS and JB.

Cool.  It has a dual-core processor so it should run ICS just fine.  I was initially a little pissed that HTC wasn't going to do ICS for its original EVO, but I would imagine ICS would run like a pig on the relatively limited processor speed and memory.

[Caliga]

Yeah, I had an earlier build of ICS pre-leak on my phone and it ran fine.  The next upgrade I'm going to do is straight to JB when those builds get stable, though.

[MadBurgerMaker]

Putting this (7.2) on my Aria right now.     Making it a cool little 32gb MP3/media player without all the shit AT&T installs on there, etc.

E:  Works great so far except that it doesn't show up in the Play store for lazy mode app downloading. 

[Caliga]

   Do you mean you don't have Google Play on there?  Alot of the mods have a separate gapps package you need to install from a boot to recovery.

[MadBurgerMaker]

  Do you mean you don't have Google Play on there?  Alot of the mods have a separate gapps package you need to install from a boot to recovery.

No, I have google play and the apps package installed.  What I'm talking about is play.google.com.  Go to My Android Apps and wildly download away with a mouse and keyboard instead of using your phone.  The Aria showed up sometime last night.  Just needed a little more time than usual to pop up on there (the rooted Nook showed up almost immediately).

[derspiess]

I think it might take the Google services process a while to get your device registered for Play.  I actually need to clean up some of my devices on there.  I have 9 that show up

[MadBurgerMaker]

I think it might take the Google services process a while to get your device registered for Play.  I actually need to clean up some of my devices on there.  I have 9 that show up

Yeah while I was waiting for the "Liberty" (the other name for the Aria) to show up, I cleaned out a bunch of stuff yesterday from when I was messing around with the Nook and seeing which OS, etc, I wanted on there.  It's so sluggish with ICS that I might actually change it again and go back to Gingerbread.  They were showing up so fast on the play store that I just let them go (then forgot about them), which is why I was wondering about the Aria this time.  Took it several hours vs. several minutes.  vOv

E: Or maybe Honeycomb, I guess, if I can even find a build for it.  Probably better to just go to 2.3.