Slashdot Mirror
Droid X Gets Rooted
An anonymous reader writes "The Droid X forums have posted a procedure to root the new Motorola Droid X, putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone if certain boot files were tampered with. Rooting the phone is the first step in gaining complete control over the device."
They may have rooted the device, but due to the cryptographic signature on the bootloader, kernel, and eFuse watching the ROM, you won't be sticking Android 2.3/3.0 on your Droid X (or Milestone) until Motorola decides you worthy.
If this lockdown was going to be fully hacked, it would have happened to the Milestone by now.
Yes but rooting the phone requires you to cut the yellow wire with the green stripes, not the green wire with the yellow stripes. If you get it wrong, you not only brick your phone, but every other droid x in a 3 block radius.
So I can understand people's fear in doing so.
First of all there was never any sort of self-destruct device in the phone. The phone contains a bootloader that only loads signed roms which so far has prevented people from loading custom roms such as Cyanogen. The Motorola Milestone (european Droid) has the same issue, has been out for 8 months, and has yet to be cracked.
It's funny that the summary for this article has the text "putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone" and links to a Slashdot story titled "Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod". So Slashdot posts a story with a bogus headline, and then later has another story saying how fear was created when it was "reported" that the phones would be bricked. Never stopping for a second to reflect on the fact that Slashdot itself was the one doing the bad "reporting".
While gaining root access is good news this particular exploit is one that has been around for a while and is ported from another version of Android on another phone. Not to dismiss the work that has been done here but the biggest problem for this device is and has always been the bootloader.
This is one of the reasons Linus kept the kernel GPL2 rather than moving to GPL3. He did not like the DRM clause and the Tivoisation clause. As far as Linus is concerned the manufacturers should be able to use DRM to block you from loading an OS they do not want you to load http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/51826
In relation to the Motorola Milestone, which shares the locked bootloader with the Droid X.
Motorola are now "deciding" whether to push out Android 2.2 (with, you know, the Flash support *promised on the box*) to the device at all
For me - I've "decided" that they aren't getting more of my business - as far as I am concerned, they can go f*** themselves.
From James King, Motorola Marketing Director:
Next European Milestone and 2.2 (Froyo). I have expressed over the last few days that the decision is pending. The team here has been collating key pieces of information and views from this community in the last month and providing input to relevant teams in Motorola so they are aware. I am pushing for that decision to be made as quickly as possible, and we can then all go from there. Some others ask why the decisions on upgrades take so long, and why does implementation then take much longer still. What I can say and have stated recently is that upgrades are not a walk in the park. Sure there are short cuts that people can take, but when you have to integrate software to a specific hardware, then test it and integrate with third party applications, let alone any innovation from ourselves, plus then get approvals to make this all official and safe its is a big undertaking that requires planning and resource and third party coordination to see this all through. As I say, once we have decision, we will inform. JK