Barnes and Noble has likely introduced a new hardware revision which bricks your unit if you install their official 1.0.0 Firmware (A step needed to root). As of right now, Nooks with serial #s starting with 1003 (running firmware 1.4.1) cannot be rooted, and should NOT be attempted. See New_Hardware_Revision for more details

From nookDevs

Pre-requisites

You will need to root your nook.

Installing apps

With an Android launcher

Apps can be installed with an Android launcher and the filemanager included in modified 1.4. With a computer copy the android .abk to either the internal memory or a MicroSD card then with the filemanager in your Android launcher navigate to the folder, select the application, and touch the green Android icon. See your launcher's page for adding installed applications to it's home page.

With adb

The following are examples of installing apps with adb from the Android SDK .

Browser

1. Download http://nookdevs.com/Browser.apk
2. adb install Browser.apk
3. adb shell am start 'http://nookdevs.com' where http://nookdevs.com is your webaddress to load
4. Control it with the touchscreen if the page is long enough or with the VNC otherwise

Pandora

I'm sure people will be asking so here is the pandora.apk

1. Download the app you want. Google for it, we aren't gonna tell you where they are
2. In terminal run this command: adb install APP.apk. It will show some output and hopefully tell you its done!
3. Run adb shell
4. Using the pandora app as a example you would run: am start -n com.pandora.android/.Main

You can find the com.pandora.android part of the URL by doing pm list packages in adb shell

Busybox

The busybox binary is available here, courtesy of and with instructions from http://benno.id.au/

       adb push busybox /data/local 
       adb shell chmod 755 /data/local/busybox 
       adb shell mkdir /data/busybox 
       adb shell /data/local/busybox --install 

You can now play with everything that busybox has to offer, for expample you can kill the browser with

       adb shell /data/local/busybox killall com.android.browser

Running Apps

Android apps can also be run with an Android launcher or adb. Custom apps can't be run with the Barnes and Noble launcher.

If you are using adb, you will need to fix WiFi drops to run most of the apps.

With adb before installing/running the apps you will need to connect to your nook thru adb.

Using VNC to control input

See VNC