Galaxy S owners, you may have a reason for some early celebration. CyanogenMod 7 for the GS variants, which has been around in relatively unsupported early alpha stages for the last couple of months, has just gone quite a bit more formal with the introduction of the new "captivatemtd" device branch.

What does it mean? Captivate is the first device of the Galaxy S bunch to move to the official CM download area in the form of nightlies. Once the nightlies, which, as the word implies are rebuilt nightly, are stable enough to warrant a daily driver, you can expect to see a number of RCs (release candidates), culminating in a stable release.

Apparently, the "MTD" part of "captivatemtd" doesn't actually mean it's a special version of the device, but rather points to the implementation details one probably doesn't need to be concerned about - this release should work for all Captivates out there.

The progress of getting CyanogenMod onto Galaxy S devices has apparently been much slower than usual due to convoluted and complicated changes in Samsung's code, which need to be merged and committed into the main CM code repository.

It's been said that the Captivate is serving as the guinea pig, the Vibrant and Galaxy S are next, while the Epic 4G and Fascinate are going to be the hardest. Here's what ciwrl from the CM team had to say:

<ciwrl> (epic is slated for last...its full of nasty hacks)

<ciwrl> fascinate = red headed step child

This article deals with a couple of advanced topics. If you’re unfamiliar with some of the terms, hit up our primers here:

For those interested in flashing the nightlies and switching over to the dark side of CyanogenMod custom ROMs, here are a few links that should get you started:

Sources: Captivatemtd nightlies, github, @atinm [1] [2] [3], IRC logs