Today I finally decided to screw around with my android phone and put a custom ROM on it. I had played around with the SDK before but haven’t actually done anything with the phone. I read on droid-life that Peter Alfanso made a gingerbread ROM for Droid 1 and I wanted to try it out.

First step was to root my phone; the rageagainstthecage exploit worked really well. I followed instructions directly from http://androidforums.com/droid-all-things-root/171056-rooting-droid-without-rsd-lite-up-including-frg83d.html except the paths. For those of you using Gentoo, the adb path is

/opt/android-sdk-update-manager/platform-tools

after you have installed the android-sdk-update-manager package. If you’re installing package from fresh, then you also need to download the sdk tools and a platform api from within the sdk. Basically just run:

/opt/android-sdk-update-manager/tools/android

After that you can just go to the android market and download ROM Manager. It requires root access, so the step above is necessary. With ROM manager you can install clockwordmod recovery and finally flash Gingerbread onto your Droid 1 (you DID already download the rom .zip file onto your sd card, right?).

The original reason I wanted to play around with Gingerbread was for the integrated SIP support. If I set my phone to receive calls from my Gizmo account, and set my google voice number to forward to both my SIP account and my cellphone. What happens when someone calls? 🙂

Unfortunately I was rather disappointed at the SIP calling. The audio was really choppy and sometimes didn’t work at all. There’s also a warning that receiving SIP calls drains your battery 🙁