Two newbie questions. Assuming I accomplish the rooting procedure without bricking the phone...Will the phone appear to operationally work the same, boot-up, log into the network, contact information still available or will phone have to be reconfigured to be operational or...? (The analogy in my mind is, if you re-install Windows, everything else gets blown away)
Absolutely, yes. The phone will be the same. It is not until you install a custom ROM (which is just another way of saying an alternate Android system) that you will probably (though not always!) lose your apps and data. (Well, you can also do the equivalent of a factory reset with the stock system, but that is definitely not required if you are staying with stock.) In fact, in order to do anything that requires root with the Eris after running the root procedure in the first three posts of this thread, you either need to do something called flash a zip file called engtools3.zip (you can think of this as installing important files into Android that actually give the stock Eris system root capability) or flash a custom ROM (which is detailed in the steps in the fourth post in this thread.)
As I said before, you don't always need to lose data and apps when you flash a custom ROM. There are ROMs that are just rooted versions of the stock Android build on the Eris. The best one - the one I would always recommend - is called xtrSENSE. With xtrSENSE, you can flash the ROM over syock and get all of the benefits of a rooted system while keeping all of your data and apps. While following the instructions in the fourth post of this thread that tell you how to install a custom ROM, there wil be an instruction to "Wipe data/factory reset". If you instead do "Wipe Dalvik cache" and continue with the instructions, you can flash xtrSENSE5.0.1.zip in the next few steps and, when you restart the phone, you'll still have all of your apps and data.
(Please note that xtrROM is different from xtrSENSE - it is close to stock, though it removes the Sense launcher completely - but you do need to do a factory reset in order to install this on the phone.)
I realize that some programs require the phone to be rooted to work, (I want to install Droidwall which is my initial reason to root the phone)-- are there other benefits to rooting a phone?
The major ones for the Eris:
- almost every custom ROM runs faster than the stock Eris. Stock Eris runs the CPU at 528 MHz; almost every ROM runs instead at 710 MHz (while still allowing the Eris to run at a slower clock speed when the phone is idle to save battery life.)
- several ROMs remove the pre-installed software that comes on the phone (Footprints, Stocks, Teeter, Amazon MP3 - if you want that, you'll still install an update anyway - Visual Voicemail). You can remove those apps manually as well, if you wish, though it's not a trivial thing to do
- a few ROMs do some tricks that allow you to move storage space used by your third party apps to a partition on the phone's internal memory that generally goes unused, which can free up a dramatic amount of space for more apps and data
- you can install stock Android (as opposed to HTC's customized Sense version on the stock Eris) and get better contact apps, better browser apps, and the ability to install apps that require Froyo or better that cannot run on the Eris (the current version of Gmail is an example of that.)
One other thing: if you do want to install, say, a Gingerbread ROM on the phone but still have access to your apps and data, you can do something llike this:
- root the phone
- install the engtools3.zip file
- install an app called Titanium Backup and batch backup all user apps
- flash a custom ROM and wipe data
- setup the new ROM from scratch, install the Titanium Backup app from the market, and do a batch restore of user apps to get all of your apps and data back (note that you will not get SMS and MMS messages back, or call logs, but there are ways to get SMS and call logs back with other apps.)
[edit - by the way, if you need it, engtools3.zip is here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/220420/Eris/engtools3.zip]
[edit 2 - if you need help with any of this - understanding, learning how (I assume that you will) - please ask. There are several of us who watch this and will be happy to help you out.]
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