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I have been on a roll rooting Android phones and installing custom software -- ROMs -- lately. Recently I faced some "mobility" problems. I didn't want to shell out $300 for a good used Android device nor did I want to shell out $650 for a new one, off contract -- and I wanted Android 4.2. I was left asking myself…how do I root a particular Android device when, in unusual fashion, there are no Mac OS Terminal instructions because the device I am working with requires a Samba server to accomplish the task?

My brother and I recently each acquired the Droid Bionic for use with Verizon. It is a two year old phone, released at the same time as the iPhone 4S and is roughly equal in specs. The phone is made by Motorola.

It has gotten some love lately from Google and has been updated to android 4.1.2 - the latest OS of any of the late 2012 releases from Motorola for Verizon. For those of you who have never touched an Android device - 4.1 is really the baseline for Android devices. It lifted Android to be on par (or near par) with iOS. The current OS is 4.2 for all new non-Google manufactured devices.

My brother and I each picked up this phone for about $80 on eBay.

Why? It has extensive support from the independent developer community out there, leaving us wondering why. Most of the phones that the devs like to hack are GSM phones (phones that would run on ATT or TMobile). The Bionic has developed an audience because it was one of the first dual core phones with LTE (4G) support. As of late 2011, AT&Ts LTE network was pretty puny. Verizon was the LTE king of that era.

Rooting phones can be fun -- a good project -- a chance to brush up on some command line skills. While OS X's Terminal is a proper interface that can be used to modify many Android devices, it can't for this model. The Bionic requires the creation of a Samba server. Samba functionality was stripped out of OS 10.7

One guy made an easy tool that ran a small Linux distribution called TinyCore OS for Windows Virtual Box that would root the phone -- and I had an old Windows XP laptop kicking around that I used to modify my phone. However --- I wanted to do this on Mac!

Well -- I didn't have the $50 to $70 to buy Parallels or VMWare Fusion and my brother needed his phone rooted as well.

My MacBook Air's 128 GB was already too full to do a Boot Camp with a 32 Bit Windows on the other partition, plus i didn't want to use Windows.

So I installed the latest Oracle Virtual Box for Mac - and the USB drivers extension pack. Then I downloaded the long term release of Ubuntu Linux 32 bit. The 32 bit version was key to accomplishing the task here here. I ran it as a virtual machine. Oracle Virtual Box set up an unnecessary firewall -- even though my OSX firewall was off. Once I removed this NAT -- I was able to follow the programming scripts -- setting up the Samba share and --- in less than 10 minutes the Bionic was rooted.

With his phone rooted, I was able to install the leading Android Custom ROM - Cyanogen Mod -- which is an official release for our Droid Bionics. We are now running OS 4.2.2, with a pure Android experience.

My brother was very happy. I won't be running Ubuntu all the time but -- I am now intrigued to play around with it from time to time especially to compare and contrast its terminal and under the hood functions with the Macs.

This entire exercise makes me think -- I really wished I learned how to program when I was younger. Some school systems are now recognizing programming languages as equivalent tolerating a foreign language. More of them should follow suit. Instead, we're still telling kids in Connecticut to plan for jobs in the insurance industry. :)