basic noob questions

[Guest savagepoop]

hey let me start off by saying thanks alot to paul for the custom roms and the rest of the comunity for helping me figure stuff out by reading various posts.

i have installed the latest madaco rom 2.5.1 but im not sure what benifits it gives? i basically installed it because im a tech head and have to mess with flashes and hardware upgrades etc. but saying that im loving the speed of the rom and the extra apps it includes especially spare parts

i have a few questions that i know you guys probably get sick of hearing but any help is great thanks.

1: what does rooted mean? (i have installed the latest custom rom even tho i dont know why lol)

2:what are cupcake/donut? (im guessing possibly firmware revisons?)

3:i have formatted my mem card and copied over apps to the card, but now when i d/l one from the store will it save to the card or the phone?

i think thats all for now, any help or info is great thanks

[Guest Parano!d]

1.root means getting access to the root of your device system,which is required for custom rom flashing,many of the apps also required rooting (doesnt wont on unrooted device)

2. cupcake is oldest update,then donut update came (yep updated firm)

3.all new app install will be automatically done on your sd card!!

cheers!!

correct me if i'm wrong,,,anyone :)

[Guest kendon]

correct me if i'm wrong,,,anyone :)

not exactly wrong, but unprecise:

1. rooted means you have access to the root user account, which is the system administrator of a unix-like system. you can do everything as root, including destroy your device (but also nice things like tethering.

2. cupcake is the up-to-date android version for our hero, it has the version number 1.5. donut is 1.6 and already released for some devices like the dream or the magic (afaik).

3. that is right afaik, when you activate the usb memory on a linux pc you will see two devices, one is a 500mb ext2 or ext3 partition with 3 folders in it, there are your apps. for windows you need a driver called ext2ifs, but if i were you i wouldn't mess with it.