South Cape

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  • Froyo Progress Update

    It’s been a while since the last XDAndroid update. We’ve since released several testing builds of Froyo, all of which have been progressively more useful and stable.

    Since babijoee’s beta-2 release, the primary focus of development has been on bugfixes. Many users have been running the builds and offering great feedback on what needs work. With their help, I’ve been able to make some major fixes in the system.

    First off, lots of people reported that their phones weren’t getting data connections out of the box. Users had to enter their provider’s mobile access point (APN) information by hand. This is an unacceptable issue and something that I missed due to testing without a SIM card in my device. The XDAndroid-specific bits in the source tree actually had a very large list of APNs in it, but it wasn’t getting copied over during system installation. This was a bug in our build system support introduced in Froyo, which has been fixed.

    Second, the Google Apps support was suboptimal. The Google Apps packages we relied on include libraries that were built for newer devices which use different CPUs. Since our devices were not entirely compatible with libraries built for those CPUs, the applications were crashing on startup. There has since been a Google Apps package developed specifically for Froyo and devices with older CPUs. This package has been integrated into our build system. Specifically, this has fixed the Voice Search application and voice input with the Android keyboard.

    Finally, I continue to make tweaks to increase performance and responsiveness of the user interface. With cues from cyanogenmod, I’ve made a couple of animations speed-ups and gave a hint to the system to use less sophisticated eyecandy features where possible. This helps improve the user experience quite a bit. There are still other places which can benefit from further optimization, so keep an eye out for more small performance gains in the future.

    These changes have been added to the source tree, but are not present yet in current releases (as of 14 July, this post’s date). Development’s pace has been increasing and we still have some bugs to squish, so keep an eye out for more test builds. For users who wish to attempt to build their own system images, I have updated the build documentation on the wiki for Froyo’s new procedures.

    PS: We still have not fixed the SD card bug noted by many HTC Diamond users, but I’m starting to get some great information from helpful users on #xdandroid.

  • Fun with Froyo

    Time for another quick update! Anybody reading this post has probably already noticed the prerelease of our new XDAndroid Froyo system image. Development on the new Froyo system is going very fast and quite smoothly. Certainly, our initial system image is not production quality yet, but we’ve already made great progress on fixing the bugs and restoring features.

    Since the prerelease, we’ve managed to get a few features working on parity with our Eclair system (this is what you can look forward to in upcoming prereleases):

    • MicroSD card support is back
    • Bluetooth “works” again
    • ADB is working and we use our rootfs utilities on the shell
    • Countless small fixes

    However, there is still a lot that needs work. We have a few notable issues…

    • WiFi still doesn’t work correctly
    • Some Google Apps are broken
    • MP3 playback doesn’t work
    • And many smaller fixes

    There is ongoing development in the XDAndroid repositories on gitorious. Developers and advanced users are free to check out the source code via repo, but there is no build documentation yet. Once the Froyo AOSP source tree is relatively stable, we will be adding that information to the XDAndroid wiki.

    PS: At the suggestion of IRC regular hamagc, I have created an XDAndroid Paypal account, where we will be accepting donations in the future. Please feel free to donate. Thanks!

  • XDAndroid’s New IRC Home

    The XDAndroid project had been using the #htc-linux channel on the freenode IRC network to collaborate development. Inadvertently, our Android-related discussion there had been stepping on some toes. That channel is used for kernel development and many of the regulars don’t wish to have Android discussion there to deter from lower-level work being completed. To solve this problem, we’ve created our own channel, also on freenode: #xdandroid. For those of you who have visited or frequented #htc-linux with us, please check out the new channel. We’ll be having all XDAndroid IRC discussion on there from now on. It’s just getting started now, but we plan to have some nice features in there to help collaboration. Thanks!

    (Note: We’ll have a web-based client available on the wiki soon.)

  • XDAndroid Official Wiki

    It’s time to introduce yet another XDAndroid service: the official XDAndroid wiki. This work-in-progress wiki has lots of useful information already. The Wiki will hopefully serve as the documentation hub for the project. Currently, the wiki can only be edited by developers. Ultimately, my goal for the wiki is to have it get users very involved in the development process. It’s a bit of a cathedral right now, instead of a bazaar. In time, I hope to get it to a point where users can contribute and developers (or trusted editors) can moderate effectively. Please leave some feedback on the wiki, its layout and the documentation. We really need to know how useful it is for users and how we can make it better!

    On a related note, the guy who gave us the domain (and a year’s registration!), sd73ta on XDA, also included a Google Apps standard edition account. So all of the developers will eventually have @xdandroid.com email addresses if they so wish. Thanks a lot, sd73ta!

  • XDANDROID with GPS on Rhodium

    Just a quick update… phhusson has managed to get GPS working on most of our devices now. He has already released a working library for Rhodium, which has been integrated into the latest rootfs. Work will be done to build a library for our other devices (ie. Raphael and Diamond) soon. Keep an eye on the XDANDROID twitter account to see when that hits rootfs. Thanks phhusson!

  • XDAOSP Project Progress (and teaser photos)

    Riding the thunder of Cyanogen’s 5.0.7 announcement, I’ve made some great progress with XDANDROID for our devices. Much of this progress comes from cyanogen’s great work, enabling the Nexus-targetted applications to run on other hardware. Note that for all of this work, I’ve cherry picked cyanogen’s changes in hopes of keeping XDANDROID as close to upstream AOSP as possible. We can worry about feature releases later.

    First of all, Gallery3D is now fully functional. In fact, I had gotten it to run before, but it would crash on rotation, sucking the GPU’s memory dry. A simple fix from cyanogen has alleviated that problem. Our XDANDROID fork brings his work to our releases. Here’s a look:

    Gallery3D running on XDANDROID

    Next up, we have some work with Live Wallpapers, also as seen on Nexus. These are a little more difficult to deal with. Most of them use complex RenderScripts, resulting in a lot of GPU memory hogging. This, in turn, leads to out-of-memory errors and Android system crashes. Unfortunately, I have not yet managed to get these working reliably with hardware 3D rendering. I’ve gotten the Grass wallpaper to run for a short time (2 seconds) before crashing. However, they do run as expected (but slowly) with software rendering, which is good progress. Here’s a look at the Nexus live wallpaper…

    Nexus Live Wallpaper on XDANDROID

    To get that working at all, I needed to change the base Android framework. The Live Wallpapers use a library called RenderScript, which does the heavy graphical lifting. In upstream AOSP, RenderScript expects an OpenGLES-2.0 capable GPU to be available. Our devices don’t have that luxury, so we have to make it happy with what we’ve got. That means not only letting it render with OpenGLES-1 hardware, but conforming to the GPU’s additional requirements because of that. Luckily, cyanogen made it as easy as flipping a couple of switches in the product config (vendor/xdandroid/msm/BoardConfig.mk).

    All of this work is going to be committed (or already has) to gitorious. I still have some more work to do, primarily concerning the Live Wallpapers, then adding a buildspec.mk switch to enable those apps over the default ones. I’m also going to try my hand at getting Launcher2 working, but that could be quite tedious as it’s currently hard-coded to WVGA devices.

    If you’re following XDAOSP Eclair development, see the project wiki for updates on how to enable those apps. Thanks for reading!

  • XDANDROID on Twitter

    By request, the XDANDROID project now has a twitter identity. If you follow XDANDROID on twitter, you’ll get the latest updates to rootfs and initramfs builds as they happen. The tweets for those two services will include a link to download and a link to the commit log. I’m also trying out twitterfeed for kernel updates, so we’ll see how that goes.

  • Quickie: XDANDROID Repository Documentation, Plus…

    Just a quick post today… The XDANDROID Eclair repositories on gitorious are working pretty well for me. In hopes of getting other people into the build process, I’ve taken the time to do some documentation on how to build XDANDROID from source. Updated information is available on the XDANDROID gitorious wiki. This information will continually be updated as development commences and options or procedures change.

    And now for a free preview teaser. At phhusson’s request(s), I’ve started initial development of a user-oriented XDANDROID kitchen (for Linux only at the moment). In the future, this may allow us to build an online kitchen similar to MoDaCo’s. Stay tuned for development of that kitchen. Current prerelease version (with no documentation) is available at my files repository.

    XDANDROID Kitchen Screenshot

  • The Beginnings of an XDANDROID Build Environment

    One of the ongoing goals of the XDANDROID project has been to build an entire system from the Android open-source project. This is a relatively simple task on its own: you check out the tree, configure it quickly (or just let the build system choose the generic defaults), and `make` it. Of course, with a generic build, there will be many pieces of hardware (and some software) left unsupported by the resulting images. For XDANDROID, we’d like to have a fully (or at least mostly) functional set of images as a result of a simple `make` command, after the obligatory configuration. With some recent work that I’ve pushed into a few new source repositories on gitorious, we hope to be on our way to achieving this goal. Read on to see what we’ve got and how to use it.

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  • XDANDROID Eclair WiFi Tethering

    Most of the devices supported by XDANDROID have had both WiFi and 3G working for a while now. In Windows Mobile, there are third party programs that allow you to bridge the 3G connection to an ad-hoc WiFi connection, providing a wireless tether for a notebook computer. After some work last night, I’ve been able to whip up a solution for WiFi-based tethering for Android on our handsets, complete with a friendly GUI. Read on to see what you’ll need to do for this to work on your XDANDROID phone.

    (more…)

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