Rooting the device

In a gist, rooting an android devices is like gaining a root access. This also means now the user can have write access to any part of file system. Some android phone need special apk’s to get it rooted, some don’t. Some device can be rooted just by editing one or more file(s).

for new device with ics

New Aakash device with Ice Cream Sandwich version comes rooted by default.

for older device with froyo

NOTE: we no longer follow this method, this is kept here for historical reasons.

init.rc and default.prop

The ‘chroot’ environment exist in the directory called linux which is in the directory /data/local/ of the device. The first step is to make the path /data/local/ writable, for this purpose the installation script(install.sh) makes backup of file default.prop from the devices to the working directory of host system and pushes a modified version of default.prop to / of the device. The device needs a reboot for the changes to take effect.

The second step is to copy a tarball linux.tar.gz to the same location /data/local/ of the device and untar it. The script also copies a binary tar file which does the work of extracting a tarball. Once this is done, we have an chroot environment ready. The hierarchy of /data/local/linux/ is same as any other GNU/Linux distribution, but completely inactive with ‘no’ web-server and graphical support.

The mounting of file-systems such as /proc, /sys and /dev/pts/ is done by another bash script aakash.sh which also takes care of initiating a webserver every time the device is turned ON. aakash.sh also sets an display environment by initiating an virtual framebuffer environment using Xvfb. aakash.sh script is called by Android’s init.rc file at boot time.

• below lines in init.rc calls aakash.sh

service myscript /data/local/aakash.sh
     oneshot

Once all the files and directories are in place, install.sh script does the work of cleanup. This will remove all temporary file created at the time of installation and lock the device back by updating the original default.prop.