Rooting HTC Legend with Firmware 3.15, HBoot 1.001 and flashing CM9

Hello to the world out there,
today's post will be kind of obsolete from the beginning, but since I had so much trouble achieving what I wanted, I decided to share my experiences.

My sister has an HTC Legend, which is a beautiful phone in my opinion. And the fact that it survived her lifestyle for almost two years now with the only exception of one battery due to it having been dropped into water and a lost battery cover speaks clearly for it. Unfortunately though, the hardware is outdated from today's point of view.

When my sister asked me to help her installing a game called "temple run", whose installation failed on FroYo, I decided to help my sister getting even more out of the Legend, which means rooting and flashing a nice custom rom. As the title says, her stock rom didn't have the best prerequisites for rooting with
Firmware 3.15, Android 2.2 (FroYo)
HBoot 1.001, which cannot be s-offed, thus meaning that /system and /recovery will always be write-protected except from within recovery
and seemingly a branding from her provider, meaning that I had to have a goldcard inserted for everything

Ok, my major problem was downgrading to firmware 1.31, Android 2.1 (Eclair), I followed all the guides in >>here<<, which caused me to face the first Problem, namely that VISIONary wouldn't be successful, thus not resulting in a temp root. Another hard reset solved that, but any other tool doing the job (like super oneclick) should also do the job. The RUU failed several times with error 171 (waiting for bootloader too long) while the Legend was stuck at a black screen with some HTC update logo. The solution for that was finally to manually boot into bootloader (taking out battery and restarting with Power and Back button pressed simultaneously) and running the RUU again.

With the still not rooted Legend on firmware 1.31 I then tried to follow >>this<< guide from within my Win7-x64 installation, which also caused problems, so I had to switch to my Linux installation. By the way, I also tried it on WinXP in VirtualBox, but since VirtualBox did not not auto-reconnect the device after reboots, I didn't succeed here, too. VMWare does probably do this better.

I'm a little ashamed for having had the next problem, but maybe I am not the only one who simply couldn't imagine to use the trackball in the custom recovery popping up next after step1. Just so you know: it is being done this way and this will be the recovery from which you can install every custom rom in the future. The only disadvantage is that you always have to start it using a script on your PC, so a cable connection is required. But while researching the forums at XDA I think I saw that there are other ways to start recovery ("fake flash") and there are even CWM recoveries available for us with s-on devices. Additionally I can tell you, that I didn't have to switch the micro-SD to a non-goldcard one, maybe it is not mandatory and the guys from the guide just wanted to prevent that someone loses its "goldcardness" by writing the rootedupdate.zip on it. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with the necessity to have a goldcard inserted when flashing roms in the future. Once a device is branded, you will always need a goldcard to install another rom.

Well, after that all worked, I headed to the XDA-Developers and found this awesome new CM9-Rom for the HTC Legend: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1562595
As you can see in the video, it runs in a very acceptable speed, but I still did the following to improve the performance:
    [Settings-> System Performance]
    I set the maximum speed to 787MHz &the governor to "SmartAss2"
    I disabled tile rendering and enabled 16bit transparency
    [Settings-> Developer Settings]
    I activated "force 2D hardware acceleration"
    (I don't think they are exactly called and labeled like this, but you can hopefully figure out what I mean)
As a result I believe that even the fade-in animation of the app-drawer isn't laggy any more.

Of course, I also had to mess with the boot-loops after installing g-apps, but luckily the solution for that is already linked to in the OP of the rom [here].

So, in the end all this was actually "simple" if I had known everything I know now before. Next thing is maybe to figure out how to get the app working for my sister. This time installation doesn't fail from the beginning, but instead the app crashes right after opening it. Logcat showed me some exceptions that occur while  trying to load some mono library which cannot be found. So I'm afraid that it will probably be impossible for me to solve that:(

Good bye for now, you see I have things to be done
yours suluke