nexus day 4
god what a pain in the ass. i finally got cyanogenmod installed. my original idea was to boil these posts down to a simple set of instructions. but i ended up pulling so much information from all over the web that i don't know which steps ended up making things work and which were just tossing a pinch of salt over my shoulder. cyanogen doesn't come with any of the google apps. so if you want those you'll have to flash them. in theory you can do that at the same time you flash your rom. but i don't know for sure. it seems that yes you must wipe to factory resets before flashing a rom. which involves going through the setup process again. so flashing all of the zips at the same time seems like a good idea. unless you want to go through the setup process again and again and again like i did. failing to reset to factory may mean you end up stuck and the cyanogen boot animation. or in an infinite reboot loop. fortunately it seems you can reset to factory after the flash. which is good. off to fry's today to get a cable. i'm hoping the end is in sight.