[AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note II] Ktype:
I've always been interested in installing ROMs, rooting, and all the cool stuff that comes with it, since my first android phone. Unfortunately, my first two android phones ended up having a lot of issues with just working stock, so when I finally ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy Note II (I317M - Rogers/Canadian) and it worked... I held off on the modding. Well, my cell contract is up, the warranty has expired, sounds like the perfect time to start.

Of course, this is post KNOX, so after reading around and watching some videos, it was unclear as to whether I could actually install ROMs at all. I wasn't worried about the warranty, just if I could do it, and it would work. So I decided to just jump in anyway.

First task is to root. I tried flashing a CWM+Root with Odin 1.85. No go. Just wouldn't work. So I ended up using chainfire's CF-Auto-root. It would give me the root I wanted, and the stock recovery. The package came with Odin 3.07, and everything worked. It flashed, I downloaded Titanium Backup and launched it, and SuperSU did prompt for root access, and everything went fine. Excellent! Two years after getting the phone and 3 years since I've wanted to do this, everything is going well.

Next task is a custom recovery. I picked TWRP, mostly because I wanted to try the Ditto Note ROM, and they suggested using that. Flashed the recovery in Odin 3.07 and reboot into Recovery with the three finger salute of volume up, home, and power. TWRP launches. Excellent. First order of business is to click the backup button and check all the boxes. Takes 1400-1500 seconds to backup the 6.5GB.

Time to get the ROM and jump in. Downloaded Ditto Note 4 v 2.2 from the team Electron site, and transfer it to my phone. So far things are looking good. Still don't know for SURE if my bootloader is locked or if KNOX will not let me do things, but I have a couple of backups, so I'm going to take the plunge. I reboot into TWRP, wipe the dalvik cache, cache, data, and system, then I install the ROM. Didn't take long at all. Time to see if it works.

At this point I should mention that the reboot function on TWRP(v2.8.6.0) seems to just loop me back into TWRP, no matter which option I choose. So I hold the power button to actually reboot... and...

TA DA! Ditto Note 4 is going through it's first start. I come across a black and white gradient fill background with some sort of animated tesseract sphere in the middle. I'm cool with that, but that also means I can add in my own animation at some point which is even more cool. Go through the start up prompts and...

The first problem. Wifi won't turn on. The other Canadians here will know the pain of not having wifi for your cell with our data prices up here. This is something that needs to be solved. Back on to the forums to see if anyone else has had the same issue, and someone did, the solution? Flash the latest AGNi kernel. Hey, I'm down, now do I flash a kernal with odin or TWRP? After spending way too much time on google, I went to the actual AGNi thread and after a few pages found out that people were installing it with CWM. TWRP it is then. I tried installing it through TWRP, all seemed to go well, though I did note that in the terminal window I did say that it failed to set permissions. That can't be good, but it did say that it installed successfully. Let's give it a go.

The phone started... but nothing had changed. I noticed the OTA Updater app, so I tried using that. Once it was done downloading I clicked the install/flash button. That wasn't a good idea. I flashed it, but ended up in a loop that would only show me TWRP. Even after removing the battery it would only go to TWRP.

What else could I do? I restored the backup in TWRP. Let's start over.

Rooted with the same method, Installed TWRP again, installed DN4 again, tried to run the AGNi settings app and found out that root wasn't working. So after some searching I came across the 2.14 SuperSU update and installed it with TWRP. Root is back. Awesome. Time to get my wifi back, installed the 4.4.5 AGNi kernel, and this time, no permission sets failed. This too, is a great sign. Got the OTA Updater download and this time, decided not to have the program reboot to install it, and just rebooted into TWRP myself to do it manually. Installed fine, rebooted and... my wifi is working.

Mission accomplished. I haven't fully tested everything yet, but I did check to make sure that the s-pen was working, the camera, and after messing with the APN settings a bit, had LTE as well.

All things considered, for a first time, not too bad. So glad I had made that backup before hand. Glad I had remembered to do that, and also to write down the APN stuff before hand. It was mostly correct to what I had, but there were 2 fields that were different, changed them and had full LTE.

So far things seem great! More testing is needed, but I can call and recieve calls, wifi/cellular data works, camera and s-pen works.

Still a noob in this department, but due to the xda-devs making good products, nothing killed the phone, and things are working great.

Thanks to Chainfire, Team Win, Team Electron, psndna88, and anyone else that has worked on any of these projects. So far things work well, and those of us with older phones really appreciate your effort and work on breathing new life into these devices. Cheers mates!