Except for the very first ROM that I loaded after I first rooted my Motorola Droid, I have used the Bugless Beast ROM’s from Pete Alfonso. I have resisted all enticements to look elsewhere. When the news of the release of the Cyanogen Mod 6 hit, I almost jumped. However, the fact that Google had forced them to remove all Google apps because it was built from source code was negative for me. Yes, I know that I could load all that stuff myself, but I was already having issues with Google Maps, among other things. Then I read some comments about another ROM called Liquid Frozen Yogurt. This ROM is also custom source-built from FRG22, from AOSP Source, and sports custom Slayher kernels that have implemented CompCache, a new potential boon to memory management that is still in testing. So, I bit the bullet and loaded it and I am so very enthused with the results.
CompCache
Some basic info about CompCache. CompCache is compressed swap that uses RAM instead of the hard drive or the main storage memory. This gives better performance since RAM is faster than typical storage solutions, at the cost of less RAM available to the system for normal use. By default, CompCache uses 25% of the system RAM for use as swap. One other hit, however, may come in the form of the CPU time lost compressing and uncompressing the data as it places it in swap space. Anyway, I wanted to give it a try to see how it goes.
Liquid Frozen Yogurt – LFY 1.5
Because of the fact that I have been experiencing so many little buggy things, I backed everything up, went into Launcher Pro, FolderOrganizer, Titanium Backup and Touchdown and made sure that I had all the settings backup up so that I could recover quickly. I then did a Clockwork backup from Recovery Mode and preceded to do a factory wipe, reset, and reformat of System, Data, and Cache. In effect, I completely wiped the Droid down to bare metal. 3 times, in fact. From there, I loaded the LFY 1.5 ROM, let the system recover everything from Google via my Gmail account. After that finished (about 130 programs and 20 minutes later) I loaded the Liquid Frozen Yogurt Black Smoke Theme, which also has many of the standard apps all color themed. You can see Facebook, Twitter, and the Music app above. These are just three examples of many. And, of course, there are probably a half-dozen different themes to choose from and more arriving every day.
Custom Slayher Kernel
After the loading of the Theme, I preceded to load a custom kernel at 1 GHz (with 7 intermediate speeds from 250 MHz on up) that supports CompCache. Most of the time, this setup is absolutely as smooth as butter, but I do notice some momentary freezes occasionally. I have made a self-commitment to run the CompCache for 3 days, after which I will turn it off and see how it goes. It really takes that long for a new ROM to settle down and get comfortable. One of the most noticeable things in all this was the HUGE increase in Internal Storage I noticed. As you can see in the center screen above, I am at 72 MB free with everything loaded. Previously, the best I could ever do was about 38 MB, and that tended to drift down. Like all build of Froyo (Android 2.2), you can open the app drawer with or without 3D effects. I always choose without. Also, in the 3rd panel above, you can see some of the themed widgets that come with LFY (top to bottom: Google Search, Music App, Seesmic Twitter, and YouTube). Also at the bottom of that screen, you can see the themed tray background at the bottom. In the opening screenshot way above, you can see the custom theme built the Beautiful Widgets.
Loading Custom ROM’s
All of this assumes that you have rooted your Android device. I am NOT going to give you a step-by-step on how to load this, because that will get you in trouble. However, it is not hard at all. Using ROM Manager, I was able to download and install all of this in about an hour. Yes, I have fiddled with the bit pretty much all day today, on and off, but it’s not really hard or dangerous. If you would like to study up on this, visit the DroidForums.net forums and take a gander at the LFY pages. It’s all there. Yes, there are 30 or 40 forum pages to go through, but it is a very education experience and it will help you decide if this is for you or not. Enjoy!