Hi all,
First post here, be gentle.
I am a linux user (pretty noob but learning) and I'm a bit confused about what I've been reading on rooting android. I'm looking at getting a Droid X and I'm just trying to understand things before I dive in (already running 1.6 as a VM to play with it).
As far as I can tell--my bash skills not being quite good enough to completely understand everything in the rooting wikis--the methods employed to gain root access to a phone (from: wiki link) use an external OS to push image files onto the phone, then remove the native rights management files (mid.txt?) and replace them with something else in the pushed files. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, cause I probably am)
When completed, this presumably allows you to run su and changes the root password or removes it (though I have no idea how that would work). If this is the case, and I root my phone does this mean that my default login to new sessions will be as root, or will I have to run su to gain privileges? And if I have to run su, what's the password?
One of the first things I learned when getting into linux was that root can be dangerous--you can kill your computer etc.--so, what does this mean for my phone? Can I just login as an admin and then sudo for the apps that need it? (Yes, I realize that I would have to install sudo and edit the list of sudoers etc.) Is it not dangerous to run as root or it it dangerous but easily ignored?
I'm just curious about this because it seems funny to me that a lot of joe shmos who have no idea what they're unleashing by running as root might suddenly hear that it's a great idea to go into a terminal and run
Code:
#rm -rf /
and I have this desperate hope that it's not as simple as that and there is some kind of rights management still in effect once a phone is "rooted." If not, and rooting a phone really does log you in as root for every session then it's much more dangerous than I had thought.
Thanks,
Bob
Is there really no one here who can answer this?
My phone is coming on Wednesday and I'd love some help with this and I can't believe that one of the brilliant people here can't answer this.
Sorry nobody replied yet. When you root there is usually a one click root app that does everything for you. After you are rooted you can install superuser from the market and it lets you choose what apps are allowed to have root access. You can search the droid forums for more info since I have an epic. If this helped please hit the thanks button below
Sent from my Epic that craves frozen yogurt
Related
This is for anyone who is experienced with rooting using the rage method (command-line), using the Terminal Emulator, etc. I'm looking to root my phone, but aside from that, just looking to poke around and see what I can do at this point.
Ok, here's the skinny: I can get a temporary root (#) on my phone via the Terminal Emulator (will NOT show up in cmd.exe via adb) using the rage method, detailed steps are in my post here.
I can't push any files to /system after I get the temporary root - /system seems to lock up with any commands, like cat, attempting to do so (another post with details). However, I can copy /system files onto /sdcard, no limits as far as I know. Also, I can use dd to make a back-up of some of the mtd partitions. That's about the extent of the poking around that I've done after many hours of poring over other forums of different devices.
Where can I go from here? Can I use a different directory on the phone to try and push either su or Superuser to? Should I just give up? Haha.
I know that I already have my own thread dedicated to my phone and trying to figure out stuff for it. So, I hope I'm not stepping out of bounds by asking a question like this in regards to this rooting method...my apologies if I am being improper. My thanks and gratitude for anyone who reads this and can help me get to the next step, as little or big as that may be.
Hi all,
As a noob, I try to learn about rooting.
But, I am a little bit more geeky than the average user. So I want to understand in bigger depth what is going on when "you root" the phone.
I have made my search around and I have a certain question:
Does rooting include (in all cases) the change of rights on the /system directory, no matter what the phone is?
Is this the 'heart" of the rooting process or am I missing something (or a lot) here?
this is as far as I know.
your phone is a mini PC running a flavor of linux. In each linux PC, there's the system admin, "root". When you root, what you do is to unlock that root user in order to execute stuff as "root". not as a regular user.
The unlocking is done via exploits in the phone / model. Thats why the process differ in phones and models.
Hope you got it. ( and hope I got it )
Hello there, thanks for the answer.
I know about Unix-oid OSes, because I have been working for a long time with them.
I wanted to understand if the ultimate goal for "rooting" is the permissions' change of the /system directory (or there is something that I didn't know). The vulnerabilities that the techies exploit is something that comes first. When they exploit these vulns, then they are ready to chmod. And then, voilà.
This is what I want to be sure about.
Hi,
I am new to the Atrix, but have a background in software development and was a sys admin on unix for a number of years.
I would like to know if, after a phone is rooted, do all apps run as root? or does routing simple install a setuid "su", and root apps call that when they need root access?
The webtop2sd post looks very complete and also something I will try soon. Do I need to unlock the bootloader to run a modified webtop from my sd card?
I would like to keep my phone as stock as possible, but enable a hacked webtop on the sd card.
Also there are 1000's of root threads, what is the safest canonical method (that can easily be undone)?
Many thanks and sorry for asking for your time. I have not found these answers around, but then again, there is a great amount of mis-information out there.
thx,
Scott.
Don't take this as "authoritative" but I don't believe they do, for 2 reasons.
1) If all the apps were running as root, we wouldn't run into permissions problems and have to run "Fix Permissions" to fix the resulting FC's. But we do.
2) If all the apps were running as root, none of them would need "su" to gain superuser permission but I still get that for certain root apps (Samba, Titanium Back, Rom Manager, etc, etc, etc).
Hello All,
I am trying to figure out some way to manually start an app as root. It seems that apps which "require" root privileges are coded to elevate to root using su. However, what I would like to do is manually start *any* app as root - even an app that does not "require" root privileges. For anyone familiar with Linux or Unix, this would be similar to running 'su -c /usr/bin/myapp' (or less so, but also similar to running 'sudo /usr/bin/myapp'). In Windows this would be like using 'runas /user:Administrator myapp.exe'. Specifically, what I would like to do is open my text editor as root, so I can modify my hosts file. I needed to change this today, but was not near a computer, and therefore I could not use ADB. I finally gave up trying to figure it out and simply used Vi from the terminal, which is fine when using ADB, but quite difficult when actually using the phone. I could not find many questions (or answers) about doing this, and the few posts I could find, I get the impression that those who replied did not fully understand what the OP was asking. If my question does not seem clear, please let me know and I will try to rephrase it. I very much appreciate any insight. Thank you.
Has anyone created a method to root Acer a1-713 manually?
Those one click methods are really crude also I don't even know what's happening in there.
If anyone knows it please help me.
Dreadful man said:
Has anyone created a method to root Acer a1-713 manually?
Those one click methods are really crude also I don't even know what's happening in there.
If anyone knows it please help me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Some said that Kingroot worked for them in this Q&A thread -> http://forum.xda-developers.com/chef-central/android/root-recovery-acer-iconia-tab-7-a1-713-t2851573
JnFrks said:
Some said that Kingroot worked for them in this Q&A thread -> http://forum.xda-developers.com/chef-central/android/root-recovery-acer-iconia-tab-7-a1-713-t2851573
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well it didn't for me. Also I want to know what I am doing with my tab and not just know that tapping this button will root my tab.
Have you ever tried to look at this site -> http://www.oneclickroot.com/device/acer-iconia-a1-713/. They featured this one-click rooting and it seems they can be trusted. I've downloaded and installed their software so no worries. Well, I'm also using a one-click root utility and it's always working. (just sayin')
The process of rooting a device is too complicated for those who don't have knowledge in Linux (like me), so your question about manually is out.
http://www.oneclickroot.com/device/acer-iconia-a1-713/
Well this one click root website was also a waste of time and didn't work either .
I may have to wait a little bit more before dumping this thread.
Rooting an android device basically means (for me) granting You (as the user) to do whatever you want to your device's system, hardware, etc. But what does root will actually do to your device that will cause you to obtain that superuser access? It's because of the "su" (Switch User) file used by Android and other UNIX-based systems that allows a process of switching of a user to be the superuser (or root user) that has access to the commands and file system, meaning those processes that requires root permission (root access or superuser access) need to invoke su. So basically the process of rooting will just push this su, a binary executable file, to the file system so that you can switch to the root user to give root permissions... And the Superuser application is just optional, but really required for some reasons, it serves as the "gatekeeper" of the su binary so when a certain command or application that invokes su will prompt the user by the Superuser app first before granting the root permission since becoming the root user can do whatever to the system which means it can cause the device to malfunction, etc... So what do you mean by manually?
Sorry for what I'd just suggest you that OneClickRoot waste your time...
Oh, there's a bad news after spending time searching how to root your device, read the news here -> [GUIDE] Firmwares, ROMs, CWM, Root - Acer Iconia (MTK) Tablets [ⒶⒸⒺⓇ ⒹⒺⓋⒾⓁⓈ]
Can't find a best way to root your Acer.
Well thanks for enlightening me on the topic, I hadn't really understood what really is su..
By manually I meant by using computer and tinkering with the files hands on.
Oh, and you needn't to be sorry since everything I tried didn't work. Sometimes I had root till the app was open while sometimes it existed until the next reboot.
Also looked at the link you gave and well, what can I say, it really is bad news and there sure is the risk of bricking my device.
Well thanks for taking your time.