What are some of the effects of flashing my HTC Desire with cyanogenmod?

Question

Recently rooted my HTC Desire (GSM) and considering flashing it with cyanogenmod. However I have a few quick questions related to flashing with cyanogenmod (or any ROM in general I suppose).

Firstly, will flashing with the ROM delete my apps/data? ie. will I be starting from a "fresh" state? (I have done a nandroid backup and also backed up all system apps + data with Titanium backup, but just curious).

Secondly, got my phone online so it's actually from Taiwan, thus it has a locale=en_TW keyboard. I quite like this 'keyboard' because it allows me to input Chinese in many different ways - namely: handwritten, pinyin, zhuyin and strokes. Will flashing with the ROM remove this 'feature' from the keyboard?

Thirdly, according to cyanogen's wiki it says:

NOTE: the ClockworkMod version 2.5.0.7 installed by Unrevoked3 is widely reported not to work with new "PVT4" batches of the Desire.

I checked and I am in that boat - have 2.5.0.7 and a PVT4 Desire. So does that mean I need to follow the below steps to install a newer version of clockworkmod?

Also, once flashed, how will I get future updates of cyanogenmod? Will I have to reflash the phone to get the updates?

Thank you!

pyko

Answer 1

1. Strictly speaking, you could try to keep your apps around, but it is generally a bad idea. During the install process you'll want to wipe the /data partition in order to prevent application crashes and weird permission issues after flashing. If you skip that then your apps and data should hang around, but it causes a lot of strangeness. The best thing to do is simply to backup anything you don't want to lose and then restore it afterwards. You will lose your /system apps because the install process will blow away the partition before copying over the CM files. Titanium backup is, in fact, the recommended way to backup your stuff, so you're set there already. Also be aware that your Google apps (Market, GMail, Maps, etc) will be gone since CM does not have permission to package them with his ROM. You can, however, download them here (bottom of the page).

2. I don't believe that is a standard Android locale, so you won't have that keyboard on CM (I don't see it as a choice on my phone). You might be able to pull the .apk file from your device and install it, though I wouldn't personally know where it is or what it's name is. If you dig around in /data/app you might be able to find it, though.

3. I generally try to stay on the most recent stable recovery versions, so upgrading is certainly not a bad idea. You can try to do this from ROM manager if it has the most recent version available (3.2.0.1 as of writing, it looks like), otherwise you can find it on XDA.

4. Updates can be acquired in two ways. One is to buy the premium version of ROM Manager and use it to download updates. In theory it's supposed to allow you to register for push notifications when a new update is released (akin to a typical OTA), but it's still kind of buggy. I can't personally attest to how well this works because I do not use it. The alternative is to simply download the .zip file of the newest version and flash it. You generally don't need to wipe /data or anything when performing incremental updates, only when going from one major version to another (6.x -> 7.x for example), so it's fairly painless. Making NAND backups before flashing updates is always a good idea, though.