Paul O'Brien is an Android hacker with mad skills. He's the man behind many roots, such as the Legend and the Desire, and now he has also rooted the new Dell Streak.

Rooting instructions, using a technique Paul called Superboot, have just been posted to the MoDaCo forum. Recovery images are to follow soon. I will mirror them here (current version 07/Jun r1) but you should always double check with the post to see if they were updated:

Introducing.... Superboot!

Superboot is a boot.img that when flashed, will root your device the first time you boot (installing su and the superuser APK by ChainsDD). No need to flash the system partition, no need to use ADB, no messing with the contents of your data partition, no overwriting the shipped ROM on your device, just flash the boot image using the instructions below and you're done!

The story behind this superboot is a little bit different to what has gone before... normally a Superboot is created based on a leaked ROM, but this wasn't possible on the Streak. What happened in this case is that I managed to find an exploit to give me root, which in turn allowed me to dump the device to images and create a Superboot image. This can be flashed because the Streak has a relatively open bootloader. This is pretty handy because it means that I don't have to reveal the root exploit... potentially saving it for further down the line if Dell choose to lock down the device a bit more.

APPLY THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Before download, you need to check your device 'about' screen to determine which superboot version you need.

Superboot (tested on build 3883) - DOWNLOAD (MediaFire Pro) / MIRROR (ROMraid / CoBlitz) - MD5: 110e69808dc5145d1d0fca80f0d9ecb5

How to use Superboot - Windows, Linux and OSX

Download the Superboot zip file above and extract to a directory

Put your device in bootloader mode - Unplug the device from your PC, remove the device battery, then replace it and turn device on with the camera button pressed. Select the 'fastboot' text on the top right, wait around 10 seconds then plug the device into your PC. The screen display should change to 'FASTBOOT MODE'. If it doesn't, repeat and retry (it's a bit temperamental!)

WINDOWS - double click 'install-superboot-windows.bat'

MAC - Open a terminal window to the directory containing the files, and type 'chmod +x install-superboot-mac.sh' followed by './install-superboot-mac.sh'

LINUX - Open a terminal window to the directory containing the files, and type 'chmod +x install-superboot-linux.sh' followed by './install-superboot-linux.sh'

Note: Be careful what you do now you have root! We don't as yet have a recovery image or recovery flash (but will soon), so if you badly break it, you might have to wait for a bit.

That's it, job done! Enjoy!

P