Installing Cyanogenmod7 (Gingerbread build) on LG Optimus 2X

Even though the guidelines to do so are described nicely in the CyanogenMod wiki, there are small things this wiki forgets to mention, which caused me a lot of pain when I followed the steps mentioned in them. This blog is an attempt to make the process of installing cyanogenmod as smooth as possible. These were the steps I followed on my O2X (LG Optimus 2X) to successfully install Cyanogenmod ROM.

Step0. Terminology:
If you are new to the world of android-hacking or new to android, in general, make sure that you are familiar the terminologies mentioned in this wiki.

Step1. Pre-requisites:

Do make sure that you satisfy all these before proceeding!

1. Make sure that you have atleast 50% (to be on safer side, 75% :D) of battery charge remaining. This is highly important! If a low battery shuts down the installation process, then there's a very high chance that you are going to brick your phone!
2.  The Recovery Mode somehow doesn't mount the internal sd-card of your phone. So, you have to make sure that you have another external sd-card plugged-in of atleast 2GB in size (on a safer side).
3. If you have data like contacts, sms, call-log and such other stuffs, now's the time to get a backup of them (onto sd-card). Titanium Backup is a nice app for this purpose. Basically, all of the data on phone will be wiped-clean during this process. So, backup all those things on your phone, which you feel is important to you.
4. You need to download/install all of these tools/files on your PC, before proceeding further: (This tutorial assumes that you are working on a PC with Windows-OS running on it)
1. Install ADB. There's a very nice tutorial on how to install this tool. I recommend you to go through this link for more details. (Please do NOT perform the step4 mentioned the above tutorial link).
2. Download busybox: Download this zip and extract its contents.
3. Download psneuter: Download this zip and extract its contents.
4. Download Superuser apk: Download this apk file onto your PC.
5. LG USB drivers (v3.2.1): Download this exe and install it to your PC.
6. It will be handy if you can extract the contents of all the zip files above into a single directory.
5. Install ROM Manager on your phone: This is a very useful tool in booting to recovery mode and then installing ROM's of your choice.
6. CyanogenMod ROM: Go to this link and download the latest nightly OR if you want to play safe, you can download the nightly numbered 53, because that's the one I downloaded and it works fine for me :). Download it to your pc and then transfer to over to your phone's sdcard. DO remember to store this zip file in the root of your external-sdcard and name it as update.zip!
7. Google Apps: Default cyanogenmod ROMs do not have any google apps installed on them, so you would have to install them by yourself. You can download the zip file from here and then transfer it to the root of your external-sdcard and let's say that you name it as google.zip.

One small thing before you proceed, as soon as you boot into recovery mode, your phone goes into an eternal vibration mode. Don't panic. It's a bug in recovery mode and it will not affect the installation process.

Step2. Rooting:

You need to root the phone prior to installing cyanogenmod. Here are the steps you need to follow for this: (In step4, the commands appearing the first indentation level are the ones you will be typing on the command prompt and the ones in the second indentation level are the ones you will type inside the shell opened by 'adb'.)

1. In your phone, enable 'USB Debugging': Settings->Applications->Development->USB Debugging.
2. Connect your phone to this PC via USB cable.
3. On your PC, open command prompt and 'cd' into the directory where you had extracted all the files from the zip files downloaded.
4. In the command prompt type the the following commands:
1. adb push busybox /data/local/
2. adb push psneuter /data/local/
3. adb push su /data/local/
4. adb shell chmod 777 /data/local/busybox
5. adb shell chmod 777 /data/local/psneuter
6. adb shell
1. /data/local/psneuter
7. adb shell
1. mount -o remount,rw -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk0p25 /system
2. mkdir /system/xbin
3. /data/local/busybox cp /data/local/su /system/xbin/su
4. chown 0:0 /system/xbin/su
5. chmod 6755 /system/xbin/su
6. ln -s /system/xbin/su /system/bin/su
7. exit
8. adb push Superuser.apk /system/app/Superuser.apk
5. Reboot.
6. Your phone has been rooted.

Step3. Installing Cyanogenmod:

Note that when you are in recovery mode, you should use the volume up/down buttons to navigate the options on the screen. In order to select an option, press the power button.

1. Open the 'ROM Manager' application on your phone.
2. Tap on 'Flash ClockworkMod Recovery'.
3. Select LG Optimus 2X in the menu that pops up.
4. You will get a 'Superuser Request' prompt. Select 'Remember' and then 'Allow'.
5. As soon as the flash is complete, you'll see a 'Successfully flashed ClockworkMod Recovery!' dialog box. Tap OK.
6. ClockworkMod Recovery should be installed on your phone.
7. Tap on 'Backup Current ROM' in order to backup your current ROM (which is, in most cases, the manufacturer supplied, stock ROM).
8. 'Reboot into Recovery'.
9. Select the option 'Wipe data/factory reset'.
10. Select the option 'Wipe cache partition'.
11. Select the option 'install zip from sdcard' and then select 'apply /sdcard/update.zip'.
12. Select the option 'reboot system now'. 
13. Now, your phone should boot into the Cyanogenmod ROM!

After this, if, you need to install the google-apps using google.zip:

1. Open the 'ROM Manager' and select 'Reboot into Recovery'.
2. Select the option 'install zip from sdcard' and then select 'choose zip from sdcard'.
3. Select the 'google.zip'.
4. Now, after your phone boots up, you'll be taken through series of asking you to confirm what are all the apps you want to be installed. Select the ones you need and you're done!

Lemme know how the info in this blog worked for you! Feedback on whether this content was useful to you would also help. : )

Happy modding!