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MIUI is a custom version of Google Android with a highly modified notification area, home screen and app launcher as well as custom apps for browsing files and performing a few other tasks. It’s proven popular with Android smartphone users looking for custom ROMs for their devices — and now you can install a test version of MIUI on the Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet.

Hackers recently figured out how to work around the NOOK Tablet’s locked bootloader so that it’s possible to load a custom recovery app and custom ROMs on the tablet. A few days ago we showed you how to install CyanogenMod 7 Alpha on the NOOK Tablet. Today let’s look at MIUI.

The custom ROM comes from xda-developers forum member cobrato, whose work is based on the CyanogenMod ROM for the NOOK Tablet and the MIUI ROMs for similar devices including the NOOK Color and Amazon Kindle Fire.

You can install the software exactly the same way you would install CyanogenMod. Here’s the short version though:

• Install ClockworkMod Recovery on your NOOK Tablet.
• Download the latest NT MIUI zip file from the link at the xda-developers forum and copy it to your tablet storage or microSD card.
• Reboot into ClockworkMod Recovery.
• Make a backup of your system in case you want or need to restore.
• Choose the option to install a zip from an SD card (or internal SD card) and select the MIUI Zip file.
• Use ClockworkMod to perform a “factory reset” in order to wipe all data from the tablet (don’t worry, this is just system data, not files on your SD card or storage partition).
• Reboot your system to load MIUI.

Again, you can find more detailed instructions for installing ClockworkMod and maneuvering through the recovery utility in our article on installing CyanogenMod 7 Alpha.

You should also know that you’ll probably void your warranty by installing ClockworkMod or any custom firmware and there’s no official support — so if you kill your tablet, you’ll probably have to figure out how to fix it yourself.

If MIUI isn’t to your liking, lavero.burgos has put together a ROM called RibbonICS which is based on CyaonogenMod 7 Alpha. The ICS in the name doesn’t mean the software is based on Android 4.0, but it’s been skinned to make Android 2.3 look a bit more like the latest version of Google Android.

Now that the door is open for custom ROMs on the NOOK Tablet, I suspect we’ll be seeing many more soon.