Rooting the Motorola Milestone and flashing custom ROM

There are a lot of guides, how-tos, blog and forum posts about rooting and flashing Android phones. I decided to add this post to that pile, because it still took me some time to find the really relevant info, especially since I had already updated to Android 2.2 and I am using a Linux machine. Hope this helps some people and doesn’t just make it more confusing or harder to find the relevant info.

Dude, where’s my Android 2.2 update?

My Motorola Milestone is still stuck with Android 2.1, even though the US version, the Droid got the 2.2 update months ago and that update was promised for Milestone in Europe an equally long time ago.

The main improvements in 2.2 are installing apps to SD in stead of internal memory, something I desperately need, since I am getting the “Low on space” warning and there aren’t any apps I can or want to remove.