I have a Nexus One that I’ve been fooling around with. It normally doesn’t have a SIM in it, I’m just using it to fool around with. So I’ve muddled my way through installing Froyo on it manually and taking it through a few updates. Generally I’ve been brute forcing my way through the processes based on following forum posting after forum posting.

Finally tonight I took some time to actually search around some and try to find “the right info” to get a rooted version of a custom firmware onto the device. The wiki area of the Cyanogenmod site is definitely the right place to go. They have some “Full Update Guides” linked from the front page which walk through step by step the different processes you need to go through, including a process for installing a Cyanogenmod firmware starting from a stock Nexus One. Exactly what I was looking for. It walks you through all the complementary processes too, like unlocking the bootloader and installing a recovery image.

I went with the stable Cyanogenmod release, so I’m slightly downgraded in terms of the Google release this bases off of. But there’s a bunch of capabilities in the new recovery image as well as root access to weigh that against… and right now root access is definitely winning.