Android 2.2

[Martin]

Hello all,

nice to see the Loox group still alive, I was a little worried since I
found www.handhelds.org to be dead. I just want to announce that I've
a working Android 2.2 on my Loox, based on a 2.6.32 kernel, which in
turn is based on what I found at www.handhelds.org and www.postnuklear.de/linuxloox/
some months ago. Now I see that work has progressed here as well, so I
thought someone may be interested in an Android port.

Android seems to be working quite well on my Loox, except for the
following issues:

Touchscreen calibration: As Android has no support for touchscreen
calibration (there are a few hacks, but I could not really get one to
work), so I putted precomputed calibration data (obtained with ts-lib)
into the driver. That must probably be changed for other Looxes. I had
the idea of using the calibration data from WinCE (it can be read from
the registry) and pass it to the Linux driver via kernel command line.
The remaining problem here is that the meaning of the WinCE
calibration data is not yet known (but it looks quite simple at a
first glance, probably just the touchscreen coordinates for each of
the five calibration points), and that I have no experience in WinCE
programming to create a tool for that.

Sound: Android is currently silent, but the remaining problem here is
only a configuration issue, the sound driver is working (when I boot
my kernel into a Debian rootfs). I still have to figure out how to
configure Androids ALSA support for the Loox driver.

Suspend: Suspend seems to be a bit unstable, but it seems to work well
when Wifi is turned off (which unloads the ACX100 module). Also, I
have the impression that power consumption of Android suspended is
higher than that of WinCE suspended. But I'm not really sure about
that, my battery is a bit dated.

Camera: I have no driver for the camera, so it is currently not
working. But I just saw that Alexanders kernel has a working camera
driver, so we could use that one.

I currently boot Android from a CF card, to have the SD slot available
as removable in Android, but booting from SD card should be possible
as well. I can provide kernel and fs images for my configuration
(although I'm not exactly sure how, Google disabled file uploads,
maybe someone has a server to put things? (about 85MB)) if anybody is
interested. I'd also like to share the sources, preferably in a git
repo.

Best regards
Martin

[Jan Rinze]

Hi Martin,

To upload to google code (max 100 MB per file) you need a google code account and i can add you.

Jan Rinze.

[Dmitriy Geels]

Hello!

This sounds interesting. I thought, android will not be very useful without hardware graphics acceleration.
May be, it worth to try cyanogen mod, based on 2.3 - there is noticeable battery usage improvement. And cyanogen mod itself contains some useful tweaks.
04.02.2011 0:07 пользователь "Martin" <loox....@gmail.com> написал:

[Martin]

Hi Jan,

thanks for pointing me to your google code project, I was not aware of
it (that probably could have saved me some work ;-). Looks like the
perfect place to put things. I think my google account should be fine
for it, so yes, please add me.

I'll try to get my stuff sorted during the weekend and put something
there.

Martin

[Martin]

Hi Dimitry,

surprisingly enough, all Android needs for graphics rendering is a
framebuffer device. They did a very good job with their software
renderer. Actually, I would expect most of the cheaper Android phones
(especially small screen ones) to contain no accelerated graphics
hardware at all. Of course, hardware acceleration would help, but it
is no crucial requirement.

I also thought about going forward to 2.3. The major part of the work
would be advancing the kernel to 2.6.35, and I think your continued
kernel work is not too far away from that. The only concern I see here
is that ram could become tight. The 128MB that we have are not too
comfortable, even with 2.2.

Martin

[Dmitriy Geels]

2011/2/4 Martin <loox....@gmail.com>:

> I also thought about going forward to 2.3. The major part of the work
> would be advancing the kernel to 2.6.35, and I think your continued
> kernel work is not too far away from that. The only concern I see here
> is that ram could become tight. The 128MB that we have are not too
> comfortable, even with 2.2.

Agree, ram is tight for android. Android 2.2 and above consumes more
ram, than earlier versions.
But it is still possible to live with it, just need to tune android
oom killer: http://androidcommunity.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-31867.html