[Galaxy A3, A5, A7, A8, A9 Q&A, Help & Troubleshoot] Dharmost:
Good evening to everyone,

I've been an Android user for the last 4 years (i started with the HTC Dream G1, the first ever made Android smartphone which had the version 1.1). The first time i approached the world of modding was for having really important features such as the sync of contacts with google account, and i also have fully modded my second device, an HTC One S, that i decided to change 2 days ago.

I purchased a Samsung Galaxy A5 and i'm going to mod it again since i don't like few things about the device.

Since i'm out of date with the current mod envirorment (the last time i did some kind of mod with my One S was over 1 year ago) i think i need a bit of refresh, so here are my questions:

1) Do i need to install some kind of special drivers, android developing tool, sdk, java things or anything special before using Odin or other rooting tools mentioned in the guides? I remember i lost an entire day the first time i rooted my devices since all the guides on the web didn't talk about installing this preliminary files.

2) I'm Italian, i live in Italy, i purchased my device in Italy too in a Vodafone store, but the CSC of my device does not appear to be Italian Vodafone, i can't rewrite it here at the moment but after a research on google i found out it was a German Vodafone CSC.

The firmware itself does not seem branded (no custom bootload animation, only the main app by vodafone which i like to have) and i'm going to change firmware anyway, but i still want to set a no-brand CSC.

When i changed the CSC of my HTC One S i remember it as a very complicated procedure, i had to extract a particular file from the smartphone using prompt's command, manually editing a text file and putting it back again with prompt.

I'd like to know if there's a different procedure for the Galaxy A5, i searched the web for a procedure but i have found none.

I saw a CSC option in Odin and i think this is probably the cleanest and fastest way, but i don't know a place where to find the various file for changing CSC.

3) Custom recovery: i had difficulties in finding custom recovery on the web too for this device, i saw a thread in this section fo the Galaxy A7. I suppose there's no custom recovery for the A5 at the moment, am i correct?

4) Any way to prevent Samsung Knox counter from increasing with root + flash of custom rom and eventually recovery? i read few guides but they seem to don't work anymore with recents updates.

Knowing if there's a way to reverse the counter in case of need it's ok too, but i've read that's much harder now than it was few years back, so i can suppose that maybe "Prevention is better than cure".

5) Are there any really really valid custom kernel / radio? I think i'm going to flash the CyanogenMod 12.1 but maybe there's some other flashable thing which is not included in this rom that can improve my devices.

6) after you've told me exactly what i can do know with my devices, could you please tell me the order for the various phases? I don't mean the very single steps, just if i have to change the CSC before or after than rooting or flashing the custom recovery before i have obtained the SU permissions ecc.

Thank you in advance for all your help, Italian forum are not very crowded in these days so i decided to write a thread in the best forum for this subject around the web!