I am completely let down by the lack of custom ROMs for the Player 4.2. So, I've decided I'm going to start building my own from source. Before I start, however, I have many questions. Hopefully, developers of other Player devices can really help me out.
The first batch of questions before starting:
What Linux distribution should I build with?
How much space do I really need for a repo sync?
What is the best place to find a device tree?
And finally:
Is building difficult?
I have experience with syncing the repo but that's it; anything past that point, such as adding device support, has given me issues.
You can also PM me if you so wish, I'm on XDA every day and I will do my best to respond quickly.
Any help will be greatly appreciated, and if this is the wrong place to post this, please let me know right away to avoid further problems.
Why do we have to miss out on the great things this mobile operating system has to offer?
Cheers, 64kb.
64kb said:
I am completely let down by the lack of custom ROMs for the Player 4.2. So, I've decided I'm going to start building my own from source. Before I start, however, I have many questions. Hopefully, developers of other Player devices can really help me out.
The first batch of questions before starting:
What Linux distribution should I build with?
How much space do I really need for a repo sync?
What is the best place to find a device tree?
And finally:
Is building difficult?
I have experience with syncing the repo but that's it; anything past that point, such as adding device support, has given me issues.
You can also PM me if you so wish, I'm on XDA every day and I will do my best to respond quickly.
Any help will be greatly appreciated, and if this is the wrong place to post this, please let me know right away to avoid further problems.
Why do we have to miss out on the great things this mobile operating system has to offer?
Cheers, 64kb.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What Linux distribution should I build with?
While it may be technically possible to build on any Linux distro, a recent version of Ubuntu will probably have the most support. The developer site at google says that you should build on Ubuntu 10.04 and that Ubuntu 12.04 is experimental. I build on Ubuntu 12.04 and use xfce4 to reduce my memory foot print, plus heimdall does not work in 10.04 and I use it all the time for kernel builds.
How much space do I really need for a repo sync?
You download approximately 10 gigs ( give or take ) but you also "check out" the files which will take another 10 gigs. In addition you need space to build. If you are planning to use a virtual machine your going to need extra swap space. I uses VMware player and have allocated 1.4 gigs of ram and 15 gigs of swap. Google site recommends 16 gigs of ram/swap. I allocated 100 gigs to my VM.
What is the best place to find a device tree?
The best place to find a device tree would be github.com .Almost everyone who works on a rom or develops for android uses github.com
Is building difficult?
I've only been building for about a month and I will say that building is all over the spectrum of difficulty. If your building for a supported device then it probably really easy. I guess the player 4.2 is not supported so your task is probably going to be quite difficult. IMO, what you are trying to do should be done by someone with experience in building and you, in order to get experience, should build for a device that already has support so you can get the feel of how things are supposed to work. I realize that is not always possible but ideally...
Good luck!
Related
I saw this a while ago, and tonight I ran into this:
http://pigeond.net/photos/xda-linux/
I run Debian GNU/Linux on my desktop at home, and I'm not a big fan of the SynCE project since I'm a GNOME user and a vast majority of the SynCE tools are built for KDE. So, I would love nothing more than to be able to run Linux on my XDA.
Has any progress been made with this? It looks like someone got linux running on the XDA, but even if we got X working, what kind of task would it be to develop a phone app? What kind of support is needed before this can happen?
Does anyone know anything about the progress? =]
It seems, that this project is located on sourceforge
Here is the Link ...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xanadux/
perhaps start the job with him.
I am also willing to help, but not familar with linux at all.
status of linux
Hi,
As you may have seen from other posts too, the Linux porting effort has been severely stalled more than once. Currently pigeon posted some progress here on the board which is about similar to what the xanadux project was in. Unfortunately no one currently has time to work further on this. I think pigeon probably will be making the most progress, and possibly we will integrate it all into one place some day. Seeing the current number of contributors and amount of time available I wouldn't hold my breath though ...
http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.0/core/images/meego-n900-open-armv7l/
My idea is to use the current effort to run Ubuntu/Debian on the phone as a method to get MeeGo running on the phone as well (Maemo should be similar). What we'd need to achieve is to get an .img of MeeGo/Maemo as we do Debian/Ubuntu. Driver issues (If present) should be rectifiable by porting over some of the Debian/Ubuntu ARM drivers.
I personally think it won't be too hard.
You compile it with the right GCC, fix any possible errors, then add an android kernel (hoping the API doesn't change, which is a longshot and probably the biggest obstacle). After that is set up we move everything to their appropriate partition, fix the path, and it really aught to work then.
i have no idea how to and how hard, but i think if people can port Android to iPhone , so this wont be something impossile
I would absolutely LOVE for this to come true. I've been frustrated with my gma500 netbook, since I can't run Meego, or even Moblin. This seems like it would be fun to run on the n1.
Should we start a bounty, I would be willing to put money up for this, dual booting two open source systems would be great.
Same here! $5 from me for the person who gets it to boot!
Finally! I've waited for someone to take up this work!
Not that I could be of any help, but I appreciate your efforts and hope for your success!
Good look!
Will be working on this. I don't think I want to flash it instead of Android and as a chroot it'll be more compatible (among ARM7 at least for now..) with other phones. Been barely successful with my old ATT Tilt w/1MB of RAM I gotta see what a Nexus can do =D
dictionary said:
I would absolutely LOVE for this to come true. I've been frustrated with my gma500 netbook, since I can't run Meego, or even Moblin. This seems like it would be fun to run on the n1.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You know that the recently released Intel EMGD drivers work on Maemo? Since they are a binary blob even worse than the PSB drivers, they won't work on (k)ubuntu, only on Maemo and Fedora 11.
i'm hazy on how we got fb support on kaiser/vogue but they're msm7k boards as well. i could be wrong but i believe team douche already has it built in. i did a lot of trial and error today to get a chrooted x-server to override android's display. i'm not sure how to get the hardware support because i fail at it and thought it would be easier to hybridize maemo over android at least for testing.
i'm all about getting this to work but irc is tedious so if anyone is actively working on it, i'm down for the cause.
I plan on, when I get time, starting my attempts. It would be much easier if I could see the basic layout of the system, but I'm so inexperienced that I don't know where to start. I have a basic idea what to do with the source once I get it, but most of my assumptions rely in part on what I can find out.
it's basically ARM Ubuntu w/a ton of customized UI but a basic Debian based distro nonetheless which is why I <3 it so much.
Well, I guess it won't be too bad then, I personally was hoping for something that was update.zip capable, and a few simlinks might just do the trick.
The key questions I can think of so far are: how are the files are laid out, how does the window server interact with the kernel, what modules will be essential, how does the phone interface with the radio, minutiae like that.
The main road block I see is that we have still not yet been able to run anything outside of virtualization. I'm not sure how the boot process works outside of running an Android build, but a pure solution would be needed for best results.
yes we can:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=631389
who wanna help me
I'm in. I found out something interesting yesterday, the Adreno 200 2D framebuffer is a standard kernel interface. So, if 3d acceleration isn't a priority, we shouldn't even have to port the windowserver. Heck, I'm pretty sure we won't have to port anything.
I guess I'm going to look at the source for debootstrap and see what hints I can gleam from it though.
what do you need from debootstrap- it just pulls down the system image but we have meego's already.
here's what we have so far to play with, where to start?
custom dual/tri boot recovery image we'll need to avoid fastbooting the kernel:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=5521417&postcount=5
i'd like to mix this into amon's or clockwork mod source with a text file on the SD card to configure kernel parameters
how to boot debian/ubuntu which we'd swap for meego's system:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=631389
should handle enough to fully boot this thing
including his premade zImage you can mess with if you suck at compiling:
http://irregular-expression.com/tmp/zImage
meego's system as linked in the OP:
http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.0/core/images/meego-n900-open-armv7l/
no gsm, no audio, crappy fb based x11 w/o drivers.
What system image are you using and how are you unpacking it? I'm not too worried about drivers, as with GSM I'm pretty sure that the API is either already set up as we need it or configurable. People on debian were getting texts to send at one point if memory serve
meego-n900-open-armv7l-1.0.0.20100525.1-sda.raw.bz2
should be the one. i believe it's an ext3 partition but haven't looked at it yet as i was looking into the debian thing. i mean gsm support for our boards which should be okay if we branch off of cyanogenmod's or similar. and if i'm right then "okay" means "complete support."
let me be more specific:
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM
and if you look at the MSM link it references a repost of the debian guide as well..
adapt these instructions for working with the image on your desktop:
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Install/MMC
and as further motivation, remember when the N900 got x86 WINE via a statically compiled ARM QEMU binary within a x86 chroot? with an x-server we don't have the ****ty VNC fail we've currently had. we could truly run x86 chrooted software (or anything in a chroot like hot-swappable desktop distros) and connect to the host (maemo's) display. and the possibilities with xephyr nested x-servers.
Well, great news on that front too, they use X.org by the looks of it. There's a 3d acceleration driver under development for it. I'm going to try first with a SD card install, as weaving around the wacky partition format is annoying. It'll be a few hours until I'm using an x86 system though to compile the kernel. By the looks of it, the kernel has to be custom in order to use an initramfs partition.
Fellow Members
Just wanted to get some advice or material that I can read, in regards to building ROM and compiling. Maybe a few websites that you would recommend? I have been a long time lurker and finally wanting to start trying some dev work for our gtablet community. Any input would help significantly
Thanks,
Thanks for asking
I too am very curious and I wonder how the current devs learned how to do what they do. I hope someone answers this question so those of us that are curious can find a place to start poking around a bit.
yes can anyone comment, would like to know aswell. thanks
I can only assume (since I'm just as clueless) that it requires knowledge of linux programming, or at least, how linux files are set up.
A lot of roms are ports of other roms, or stock firmware. For instance, VEGAn 5.1.1 is a port of the Advent Vega firmware. The Vega, and Notion Ink Adam are all tablets with the same, or mostly similar hardware as the G-Tablet. If one can get their hands on the firmware for those, then tweaks and adjustments can be made to make it work on the G-Tablet. That's what's heppening with the HC ports right now. They are not originating with Roebeet, Linuxbossolutions, et al. They are ports of the roms based on the work being done with the Vega, Acer, and Asus tablets...
REally all that is needed is the source code for the rom you're thinking of emulating, then the knowledge of where to look for the files that need altered to make it functional on the device you want it on.
That's the beauty of the G-Tablet, it's relative unbrickableness (is that a word, well, it is now) Once you have a rom, you can open revise it to your heart's content, NVFlash it to your device and see if it works, if it doesn't, change somethign else, change it back, edit this, edit that, reflash it and see what happens. The HC roms are all in Alpha mode right now because they need tested. A developer can only do so much in testing...having 50 people testing a rom, for an hour each is a lot better than testing it yourself for 50 hours.
I was able to find a few "how to" books for creating android .apk files, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a source for reading how to hack, edit, and revise android firmware source.
If you are wanting to build from source, Google "how to build AOSP" or such.
You'll also have to look towards cyanogenmod for some tips and/or at least forking the repository they have for the gtablet device.
You pull the source code to Android down to your linux workstation (or linux running in a virtual box) and you have to add in the source repo for your device as well as fork off the repo's you plan to edit.
I went through this around this time last year. Froyo was coming out in leaks for the original Motorola Droid and I wanted to learn how to compile the AOSP that Google/Android provides (Android Open Source Project).
It was a difficult learning experience because no one wanted to share any information except Cyanogenmod Team and I was trying to build as straight AOSP as possible.
To really do it right.......
Setup a Linux workstation (or virtual, I did it this way).
Learn as much as you can about git and github.com (learn about forking, creating repos, syncing, editing and pushing your edits, etc..).
Be prepared to spend many hours/days/weeks/months editing, re-editing, reverting and cussing as you run successful "makes" against your source only to have it lock your device.
I eventually wrote a guide on how to build for AOSP but it is tailored to the motorola droid. Most of the steps are identical though you would need the device repo for the gtablet (smb_a1002) instead of the Droid (sholes).
If you want a brief look at it http://android.snkbitten.com/ and look at the AOSP source building guide.
Other than that...you can take other's ROMs, open them up (on your PC), replace files, edit the framework files etc... and then repackage it. Find the pieces that work best together (in your opinion) and roll with it. Change the build.prop to have your device name, etc...
During my learning experience I borrowed a lot from cvpcs, cyanogenmod, koush and a few others. Pouring through their github accounts to see what they were doing, sometimes manually pulling in certain aspects I liked but not wanting a copy of what they were doing..... It was time consuming and some times hair pulling out frustrating!!! However...I have a ROM in ROM Manager for the original Droid that I've been running ever since.
I thought about modifying my setup to allow multiple device building and doing a Gtablet SnkBitten ROM....but just never put any effort towards it.
I'm sure this is a stupid noob question, but:
Can I build from source on a Chromebook without running Ubuntu in a box? If so, can anyone point me in the direction of a resource for that? I'm only asking because the wifi only Chromebooks are pretty cheap - cheaper than I am likely to find a macbook.
austontatious said:
I'm sure this is a stupid noob question, but:
Can I build from source on a Chromebook without running Ubuntu in a box? If so, can anyone point me in the direction of a resource for that? I'm only asking because the wifi only Chromebooks are pretty cheap - cheaper than I am likely to find a macbook.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are very unlikely to find your answer here. What exactly are you wanting to do? Install a different OS on it?
Sounds like he wants to build Android from source code which is usually done it a Linux system. I'm not sure the answer, but it seems like you should be able to. Unless Chrome is not as powerful since it is browser based system.
I don't know if this is correct but....
I would assume that you can't because chromebooks are not powerful at all. There's almost nothing that eye popping about the specs of chromebooks. On top of that, there isn't much you can do with a chromebook because it is a browser-based operating system. If you really want to build from source just buy a cheap DIY computer from Newegg or something and install Linux on it.
Please use the Q&A Forum for questions Thanks
Moving to Q&A
You can't do what you want right out of the box on a chromebook. But you can open em up and flip a switch which will allow you to load linux or ubuntu on them. Only caveat is that the one I have is an alpha tester model they gave to us (the company I work for had a deal with google) so jot sure if that I the case wih the newest ones.
3VO Sent
austontatious said:
I'm sure this is a stupid noob question, but:
Can I build from source on a Chromebook without running Ubuntu in a box? If so, can anyone point me in the direction of a resource for that? I'm only asking because the wifi only Chromebooks are pretty cheap - cheaper than I am likely to find a macbook.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As long as you're able to get to a unix/linux based terminal/shell, you *should* be able to compile the Android OS.
Now there are a few caveats to the process, I recall hearing a 64 bit instead of a 32 bit system was required for gingerbread and above, plus there might be some other operating system dependencies. There might also be a RAM requirement.
Also, it can take an hour or two on many modern computer builds. This might take a very long time on a laptop or stripped down laptop such as a chromebook.
I've only compiled inside Ubuntu as that is the recommended OS by Google in their directions. I've compiled using Ubuntu as main booting OS and with Ubuntu being booted inside a VM on a Windows Host.
Best place to start is with Google's official directions for compiling AOSP: http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html
I found this link by searching google.com using the terms: android complie source code
The requirements and notes Google's mentions in their directions:
"Note: The source download is approximately 6GB in size. You will need 25GB free to complete a single build, and up to 80GB (or more) for a full set of builds."
"The Android build is routinely tested in house on recent versions of Ubuntu LTS (10.04), but most distributions should have the required build tools available. Reports of successes or failures on other distributions are welcome.
Note: It is also possible to build Android in a virtual machine. If you are running Linux in a virtual machine, you will need at least 16GB of RAM/swap and 30GB or more of disk space in order to build the Android tree"
Hope that helps! Good luck!
Thanks for the help! So it looks like I could *maybe* do the build on a chromebook, but regardless I wouldn't want to. Correct?
austontatious said:
Thanks for the help! So it looks like I could *maybe* do the build on a chromebook, but regardless I wouldn't want to. Correct?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Assuming you were able to get everything setup on the Chromebook, at bare minimum it would take a few hours, if not much much longer to complete the compile based on Chromebook hardware and Google expectations as outlined in my previous post.
An alternative, would be to ssh into a build box from the chromebook and compile using this method. This would probably be an approach I would be willing to take. Just throwing out another idea as there are a few reasonable alternatives.
In my experience, compiling AOSP is one of the more hardware intensive tasks I perform on my desktop .. if not the most intensive.
Hope that helps!
I am going to start building roms and porting roms etc. I may not be a developer, but when I am to a level of satisfaction with myself, I probably will be. I am posting this here because I will be building for this phone.
I recently acquired a windows vista laptop with major (I mean MAJOR) software issues and driver conflicts that I have been able to fix, as the PC could not even boot into an OS, I will be installing windows 7 ultimate when the download finishes. I am not a noob when it comes to working with PCs and etc.
So please post and tips, tricks, guides, and general help here or PM me.
I would have started sooner if I had the computer to use and work on.
I plan on learning more than just building and compiling but that would be a good start.
Link420able said:
I am going to start building roms and porting roms etc. I may not be a developer, but when I am to a level of satisfaction with myself, I probably will be. I am posting this here because I will be building for this phone.
I recently acquired a windows vista laptop with major (I mean MAJOR) software issues and driver conflicts that I have been able to fix, as the PC could not even boot into an OS, I will be installing windows 7 ultimate when the download finishes. I am not a noob when it comes to working with PCs and etc.
So please post and tips, tricks, guides, and general help here or PM me.
I would have started sooner if I had the computer to use and work on.
I plan on learning more than just building and compiling but that would be a good start.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First tip - ditch Windows and use a Linux distro. I use Ubuntu. A LOT easier to build from source using a native machine, imo.
Dual-boot that ****. I need me my Win8.1 for stuff like rearranging tiles for no reason.
Actually, I get to rebuild my computer tower when I get a chance to use my friends spare parts. My laptops motherboard went out yesterday about 20 minutes after I installed ubuntu, And it was a dual boot. Ruined my day. So hopefully I'll be able to restart the project when I get the tower rebuilt. As it is from about 2002 with 512mb of ram. Could be a few days or weeks, who knows.