Good evening, I just prepared a release candidate for Koolu's beta 4.
What has been keeping us busy? ============================== * Integrating patches from the community. As usual, we appreciate the enormous interest and dedication the community has put behind this project and we welcome warmly every patch you can send. * Integrating the code Sean McNeal recently released, in order to give it widespread testing. In other words, getting the phone to behave as a phone. * Integrating Qi, the newer bootloader from OpenMoko. Qi allows the device to boot faster and in a deterministic way. * Faster boot time. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but right now, my test device does a full cold boot in a little less than one minute, with minimal feedback as early as 5 seconds into the boot process. I'm pretty sure this can be improved a lot and I'm looking at ways of achieving this. * Getting Android to run completely off NAND, which is not only faster than running it (partly) from the SD card, but this also provides more stability, as the behavior doesn't depend on having the "right" SD card inserted (or having an SD card at all). Several users have reported significant trouble when running Android in the current mixed mode. * Getting the so-called "cupcake" branch to run. This has been a huge amount of work and you can see the early results. Getting Android to run off NAND only is a bit less trivial than it sounds. First of all, the /data partition needs to provide certain semantics that a JFFS2 filesystem does not provide. Among the candidates that do provide this is YAFFS2, but it has the extremely aggravating property that it's hard to create a YAFFS2 filesystem out-of-device (let's just say that userspace tools are lacking). After some misfired attempts I was able to device a way to install everything in the right place and with the right format. It's a little convoluted, but I hope very straightforward from a user's point of view. Where to get this? ================== For the koolu-1.0 branch, get: http://koolu.com/~marcelo/android-freerunner-koolu-1.0-beta-4-rc1.tar For the early cupcake release, get: http://koolu.com/~marcelo/android-freerunner-cupcake-beta-1.tar How do I install this? ====================== Because of the changes required to run off NAND, an extra partition is needed. This extra partition can be configured in u-boot using the environment or you can just go ahead and try Qi. I've been very satisfied with Qi's performance and simplicity, but YMMV. Since Qi does not read an external configuration file, you need to use the supplied Qi image and flash it to the "u-boot" partition on your device. After that you can flash kernel.img to the "kernel" partition and system.img to the "rootfs" partition. Or you can try the automated install procedure. This has been possible in many ways thanks to ideas Andy Green has expressed in the OpenMoko mailing lists. I just explored a tiny fraction of the possible directions. A very important side-effect of this is that you don't need a Linux PC to install Android on the FreeRunner. If you have a way of writing to an SD card without using your FreeRunner, you don't even need a USB cable. If all you have is a PC with Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS, you can use that. WARNING: This procedure will zap your current rootfs, kernel and u-boot partitions. If you care for its contents, back it up first. Still with me? * Untar the chosen file from the mentioned URLs and copy the contents of the resulting directory to the _root_ of any partition on your SD card. The partition can be either a FAT or an ext2/3 one. * Now you need to boot from the SD card. The easiest way of doing that is booting to NOR u-boot (turn device off, press and hold AUX, press and hold POWER, wait 1-2 seconds, release AUX, wait for the menu to show up, release POWER). From there you can select the option to boot from the SD card. You'll see some messages flash on the screen and you'll see a line that reads "Installed Qi". The device will reboot, some more messages will flash by and you'll see a message that reads "Installed everything". After this the device will reboot again, and you'll see a shiny new graphic on-screen. In less than a minute you'll be running Android from NAND. I have tested this procedure with several SD cards, with several partition layouts and two different devices and it has worked 100% of the time for me. I'd love to hear from you if something goes wrong. Happy 'droiding, Marcelo _______________________________________________ android-freerunner mailing list [email protected] http://android.koolu.org/listinfo.cgi/android-freerunner-koolu.org
