Nook Tablet Update- Part I

I finally took the time to root my Nook Tablet today. I’d been keeping an eye on it and the guys at XDA came up with a fairly straightforward process for rooting it that simply involved using a custom SD card and a special APK. From there, I also took the time to get the Android SDK working on my netbook so I could ultimately re-enable sideloading of apps again, as the root process doesn’t re-enable that functionality yet.

Here’s the link to the process for rooting the NT using an SD card. I used a 4GB card. The initial post contains 90% of the instructions assuming you know hot to reformat memory cards and the like. The final piece to the puzzle for me was what to do after creating and booting the SD card.

Theoretically, it should be possible to perform all of the formatting steps with the card in the NT, especially if done from an attached Linux computer. That said, I used a microSD card adapter and performed all the operations right on my netbook. Essentially, the card becomes a custom boot loader and can run any program a developer wants. In this case it starts a program called ClockWorkMod. CWM presents a bunch of actions to take, from simply rebooting the device to installing things from zip files. For navigational purposes, the ‘n’ button on the NT selects the action while the volume keys are used to move up and down through the list of options. Clever.

Assuming the Gapps_and_root.zip file is located on the internal SD card of the NT, select the install zip from internal sd option, then navigate to wherever the file is. In my case, I stashed it in media/mnt as the instructions advised. If the file is on the external SD card, then use the install zip from
SD card option to select the file. The program will then request confirmation along with a warning that you could potentially be zooting the NT. All I can say is it didn’t zoot mine.

After rebooting, well, there won’t be much obvious difference. Mainly, the Android Market app will be installed and it will now be possible to install applications from there. But stuff from the Amazon market will still not work. To get that working, it’s necessary to install another application using the adb.

And to do that, adb has to be able to find and recognize the NT and in order to to that, the NT has to be put in debugging mode. Oh, did I mention udev? But it’s late, meaning that will be a topic for one of tomorrow’s posts.