How do I root the NOOK Color to run Honeycomb

PART 1 - Why you should root the NOOK Color to run Honeycomb

The NOOK Color is a $250

e-reader device

. It's got a capacitive touch screen that makes it a good alternative to some other less expensive Android tablets with imprecise and non-multi-touch resistive touch screens.

The software that runs the unmodified NOOK Color is based on Android and works quite well for an e-reader. It includes a rudimentary web browser and a few games and simple apps, but its primary function is as an e-reader. If you want to make the NOOK Color do more, it's fairly easy to do as we'll show you in this series.

XDA Developers user Deeper-blue has created a simple solution to

get Honeycomb running on your NOOK Color

. Perhaps the best part about this solution is that it doesn't require that you permanently

modify your NOOK

. The

Honeycomb Android 3.0 OS

runs from the microSD card, so if you remove the card you remove the hack and the NOOK is back to running its default software.

If you already own a NOOK Color, then the cost of this hack is about $50 for the microSD card. Otherwise you'll need to shell out $250 for the NOOK Color itself. Also, while you can do this hack with a 4GB card, we recommend that you use card that holds at least 8GB if you intend to put the Android Market on the device and in turn, download apps. Here's a list of what you'll need:

1 NOOK Color - $250
1 microSD Card - Class 4 or better, 4GB or greater (8GB+ recommended) - ~$50
deeper-blue's nookhoney04.img, 190MB - Free
1 Windows or Mac computer
1 microSD card reader or an SD card reader and microSD card adapter

PART 2 - Using a Mac to install Honeycomb on the NOOK Color

In this episode, we're going to use a Mac computer to

install Honeycomb on the NOOK Color

. We're using a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.6.7 but the process will be the same on any OS 10 Mac.

First, you'll need to download the nookhoney04 zipped disk image file from bscotch.tv/nookhoney if you haven't already done so. Now Unzip the file. The 190MB file becomes a nearly 4GB image file.

Now, we'll insert our SD card and open up a Terminal window. Type "diskutil list". In the resulting list, we're looking for our microSD card, which should be pretty easy to find. Look for the brand of your microSD card and check that the size corresponds to the size of the card. In our example, the SD card is disk1 and we can confirm the size which is 4GB.

Now, we unmount the disk using the command:
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk number, in this case disk1

We're presented with notification that "unmount of all volumes on disk (number) was successful."

Now type:
dd if=nookhoney04.img of=/dev/rdisk(number) bs=1m

This command tells terminal to write the nookhoney04.img disk image that we unzipped bit-for-bit to the microSD card. The process will take about 10 minutes and Terminal will give you a message when it's done. Once that's finished, just pop the microSD card out of your computer.

On the bottom right corner of your NOOK Color, open the microSD card slot and insert the microSD card. Power it up and about 45 seconds later, you're in Android 3.0, Honeycomb. When you browse around, you'll notice a distinct lack of any Google apps, most notably the Android Market. Getting that installed is a little more involved so we'll be covering that in an upcoming episode.

If you're a dedicated Mac user, skip ahead to episode three of this series. If you're more of a PC person, the next episode will walk you through writing the nookhoney image to your microSD card in Windows.

PART 3 - Using a PC to install Honeycomb on the NOOK Color

In episode two of this series, we used a Mac to load Honeycomb onto a microSD card. In this episode, we'll be putting the Honeycomb image onto a microSD card using Windows. On the Mac, we were able to write the nookhoney image to our microSD card with a few Terminal commands. On Windows, we'll have to download some software in order to perform the same task. We're using Windows 7 here, but the process will be pretty much the same in any version of Windows.

Before we do anything else, we need to download nookhoney04.img.zip from http://bscotch.tv/nookhoney. The software we'll be using is WinImage which you can find at http://bscotch.tv/WinImage. WinImage is shareware and the trial period is good for 30 uses.

Now, install the software. In the Disk menu, choose "Restore Virtual Image to Physical Drive" and browse to the unzipped nookhoney.img file. You might have to change "file type" to display all files if you don't see your .img file. The write process should take about 10 minutes. Don't touch anything during this time. When the write is finished, WinImage will let you know.

Now, safely eject your microSD card and remove it from the computer. Ensure your NOOK Color is powered down and insert the microSD card into the slot at the bottom right of the device. Boot it up and, in about 45 seconds, you'll see that you're running Honeycomb on your NOOK Color.

One thing to note is that at first, you'll notice a distinct lack of Google apps like Gmail and, most notably, the Android Market. The legal terms of use for Android prohibit developers from packaging these apps into builds that haven't been specifically authorized by Google. In the next episode, we'll look at getting these important add-ons up and running on your NOOK Color running Honeycomb.

PART 4 - Installing Android Market and apps on your NOOK Color using a Mac

Installing the Android Market

and Google apps onto our new Honeycomb tablet can be a complicated process. Thanks to AddictiveTips.com for their excellent guides which helped in the making of this tutorial.

To begin, we'll need to do a few things to get the Android Market and Google apps up and running. First off, you need to have the

Android Software Developer Kit

. You can get it at bscotch.tv/SDK. We recommend saving this folder in your home folder for easy access. You can move or delete it later.

Unzip the package and go into the Tools folder. Here, launch the Android item. Terminal will pop up and a few seconds later you'll get the Android SDK GUI. Click on Installed Packages and choose Update All. It will take about a minute to pull all the data in. Next, deselect every package except Android SDK Platform-tools and click the Install button. You may be asked to restart ADB. Choose Yes.

Now, go back into your Android SDK folder. You should see a new folder called platform-tools. You'll now need to download the Android Market, which is a file called Vending.apk. You can find this file at bscotch.tv/Vending. Save this file to the platform-tools folder. Next you'll also want to get GoogleServicesFramework.apk which you can find at bscotch.tv/GoogleServices.

Now, open up a Terminal window. Navigate to the platform-tools folder of the Android SDK by using "cd" which stands for change directory. In our case, we've dropped the folder in the home user directory to keep things simple. All we need to do is type "ls" to see a list of files and folders.

Type "ls" and look through the file list for this file: android-sdk-mac_x86

Type "cd android-sdk-mac_x86" to enter that folder. Now type "cd platform-tools" to enter the next folder. Now, ensure your NOOK Color with the Honeycomb SD card is connected to your computer and powered up. If you know what a path is and how to add a folder to it, go ahead and add platform-tools. If not, we'll be prefacing all commands with ./

Now, type:

./adb shell mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 /system
./adb push Vending.apk system/app/Vending.apk
./adb push GoogleServicesFramework.apk system/app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk
./adb shell
cd system/app
chmod 6755 Vending.apk
chmod 6755 GoogleServicesFramework.apk
exit
./adb reboot

Your NOOK Color will reboot. Give it about 40 seconds to do so. Afterwards, you can unlock it. Go to Apps and you'll now have

access to the Android Market

and you've also got Maps and Gmail, among a few other Google apps.

PART 5 - Installing Android Market and apps on your NOOK Color using a PC

To get started, you'll need to grab the

Android Software Developer Kit

(SDK) which you'll find at bscotch.tv/SDK and the Java SDK which you can grab from bscotch.tv/javaSDK. Thanks to AddictiveTips.com for their excellent guides which helped in the making of this tutorial.

First, install the Android SDK and go through the update process. De-select everything except Android SDK Platform Tools and hit "Install."

Now, we'll need to add the directory c:\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools\adb to our Path. To do that, right-click on My Computer, select Properties and choose Advanced System Settings. Click the Environment Variables button under the Advanced tab. Find Path in the System variables list and edit it. Make sure to simply add that line and leave the rest as it is.

Next, we need to install a driver so that our computer recognizes the NOOK Color when it's plugged in. This will allow us to push packages onto the NOOK. Open the Android SDK again and select Available Packages. Expand the list for third party add-ons and then expand Google Inc. Look for Google USB Driver Package and select it. Click Install Selected. In the window that appears, select Accept and then Install.

Now, plug in the NOOK Color, booted into Honeycomb. You'll also need to grab HoneyGApps v2 from bscotch.tv/apps. Unzip the archive and double-click HoneyGAppInstall. The Market, Maps and other Google apps and services will now be pushed to your NOOK Color.