Sunday, October 30, 2011

Android-x86 updated to 2.3.7

The gingerbread-x86 branch has been updated to AOSP 2.3.7 release.  And a  new target has been added: amd_persimmon
I'll build a new ISO as soon as I can and upload it for testing.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Android-x86 Gingerbread 2.3 RC1 (Test build 20110828)


The Android-x86 project is glad to announce a new test build 20110828 for public testing. Live CD ISOs are available from the usual sites. Here's my generic_x86 compile of Android-x86 2.3 from August 28, 2011. Whenever my internet connection speeds back up I'll re-sync, re-compile, and re-upload the newest Android "Gingerbread" 2.3 RC1 test build.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Gingerbread x86 pt3 and some light reading

Gingerbread x86 2.3.5 has been baked and is ready to be served! I built a new ISO, and while hardware acceleration still isn't available in the generic branch (leaving the photo gallery and live wallpapers slow and practically useless) it's still a nice build.

On a different note, I've been doing some light reading and I've been truly enjoying The True Grimoire by Jake Stratton-Kent. I haven't been working on any new music lately, or even playing the keyboard as much. Inspiration while strike when it's ready I suppose.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Android Gingerbread x86 part 2

The folks at Android-x86 Project have updated their codebase and ethernet support has been added to the gingerbread-x86 branch. I made a new build the other night and it's working great! I'm also really excited that the keyboard is in English now. That was a surprise because I didn't see any documentation mentioning a change.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Android Gingerbread x86


I've become more and more interested in Android lately, specifically Android x86. Today I built my own Gingerbread x86 using Android-x86 Project's instructions and with a little help from a friend who's Linux knowledge greatly exceeds my own. In order to build Android for x86 you need to compile the Android source code from android-x86.org's git repositories. Since Gingerbread x86 can only be compiled on a 64 bit build environment I used my Ubuntu Studio x64 (10.04) install on my AMD Opteron 165 desktop. I'm going to detail the steps I had to take to complete this process to help anyone out there who may have had the same problems as I did.
After Initializing a build environment, I went ahead and moved on to obtain the source code. I made my working directory, android-x86, in my home folder. I also had to download repo using
git://android.git.kernel.org/tools/repo.git
and copy the contents of the newly downloaded repo folder to my android-x86 folder. Then I had to change the word python in line 23 of the repo file to python2.6 (this was necessary because for some reason the Python 2.7 was causing errors when I tried to run repo). So now I had my /home/android-x86 with the repo files inside and the modified repo file to point to Python 2.6. In terminal, I cd'd to android-x86 and typed the following:
./repo init -u git://android-x86.git.sf.net/gitroot/android-x86/manifest.git -b gingerbread-x86
After receiving the manifest I had to enter a username and my email address, and whether I wanted to have colored text (never saw any colored text even though I said yes). Once repo was initialized I ran
./repo sync
If you havent noticed by now I had to use slightly different commands than the ones given on the website. I let repo do its thing and when it completed, I had to do the repo init command again using git://git.android-x86.org/manifest.git instead of git://android-x86.git.sf.net/gitroot/android-x86/manifest.git because apparently the sourceforge link missed a few things it needed to download. Once my build tree was complete I had a ~3.1GB android-x86 folder and I was almost ready to build my ISO. I had run into an error while building the ISO and after some googling I found a forum post with a command that fixed my problem with lstdc++:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.6 /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so
So now I could start building my ISO! I ran the command
make -j2 iso_img TARGET_PRODUCT=generic_x86
The whole building process took a while but when it finished I ended up with a 174.9MB ISO

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