I'm eagerly awaiting the ROM kitchen release myself, as I'm not on the ROM team and can't tinker with it until everyone else can. :(

That said, and I just know I'm adding fuel to the fire here, I find it interesting from a sociological perspective that some of the "technology adepts" here seem to want to scare n00bs away from the ROM flashing business. I was pretty intimidated by the whole thing myself at first, and I'm not only a former professional developer and I think my history with mobile tech is pretty well documented, writing for years for Writing On Your Palm, Pocket PC Thoughts and 1SRC.

But the interesting thing is that once you get into it and do the required reading (all the threads on how to do this are here on PPCgeeks), building ROMs as I did from Shawn's PR2 kitchen is really just a matter of dragging and dropping folders around and then running a batch file. That's it. The skill required to customize a ROM is really no more than basic PC 101. It gets a lot more complicated when it comes to creating your own kitchen OEM packages or customizing what's out there (for instance, my OEM package of PocketPlayer uses different preset registry settings than the one on the FTP site), but as far as just removing the MSN crap and adding in pre-built OEM packages from the FTP site, anyone can do this if they do about 2 hours of homework learning how. Yes, you still have to do homework.

I've thought about writing up a detailed how to on how to cook your own ROM, but so far I haven't for two reasons. First and most important, anything I do will be obsoleted when the official ROM kitchen project gets released (see the thread on the official kitchen application for how this will become a Windows install wizard process, no more complicated really than installing any other software package). Secondly, I'm bipolar and I'm in a pretty massive depressive phase right now and probably only spend an hour or two a day on the PC at all, and almost nothing seems like it's worth the effort.

Huh, that got personal, didn't it? Anyway, what I'm saying is this. It took me about half an hour to create each of my "clean and simple" ROMs, probably not even that long. Anyone who does just a little reading into how to use the kitchens already posted on the FTP site can build a custom ROM of their very own in about the same amout of time. Give it shot, it's really not as hard as the hardened technogeeks would have you believe.

This is nothing. You should see the anti-groupies I have over on Palm Infocenter. Quite the "We Hate Kirvin" club over there.

I wasnt trying to mean i was just making a point about why someone might make things difficult on purpose , its to discourage someone without experience to do the research. Sorry if i came off like an ass, I was trying to be more like an smart ass :D

PS. I'm as n00b as the come at least to the room cooking/oem building part :D

Just to chime in here.

A lot of the basic stuff is, as Jeff points out, pretty easy. Small modifications to kitchens (e.g. taking out programs you don't want) and and adding OEMs from the FTP site make kitchen usage fairly accessible (which I believe was the idea to begin with). Of course, there are more complicated steps as well. But for most of what the majority of you would like to do, it should be relatively straightforward.

But the thing is, from at least some of what I've read, there are a lot of people who don't seem interested in doing that basic bit of reading. Jeff has stated that it's pretty easy to duplicate his kitchen (and from what I know, I'd concur), so this is kind of a challenge, I guess: to those of you who would like to see program x or program y, why don't you try doing it? It takes a little bit of reading and playing around with to see how things work, but once you've done that part of it, you can do just about anything you want with the kitchen. :)

The other key thing, though, is that before you embark on any of this custom ROM stuff, I'd have to agree with somebody else (who can comment if he wants to) that you really should be comfortable with the basics of Windows Mobile first. If you're new to Windows Mobile, stick with an original ROM first, get the feel for it, and only when you have a really good idea of what you like, don't like, and what you'd like to change, should you start traveling down this road. It's too easy to get lost. :wink: