Porting challenges

[aman1127]

First and foremost, I would like to say that I have no knowledge in ROM development....

I was just curious, if android is open source, then why is it so hard to port it over to our device? I just learned how to root and played with my hero and I really want 2.1 on my TP2!!

Thanks guys!!!

[WoZZeR999]

The biggest issue is drivers and knowing exactly how the hardware works on the device. While the platform is open source, people need to create and/or modify current drivers to get them working.

At least that's as far as I understand it.

[sjs01]

Originally Posted by aman1127

First and foremost, I would like to say that I have no knowledge in ROM development....

I was just curious, if android is open source, then why is it so hard to port it over to our device? I just learned how to root and played with my hero and I really want 2.1 on my TP2!!

Thanks guys!!!

This actually is not just a ROM, this is developers who are porting android to our phones using a type of linux I believe.

Now for your question, since this is not ROM development it is a lot more difficult as WoZZeR999 said they have to create, or port these drivers from one operating system to another, they have to change code, this isn't just rooting your device, or for the TP2 unlocking the device, this is the developers writing, or porting code. We can't have an actual android on our device I don't think, all we can have is linux running what looks like android (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). So you see what these developers do is a lot more difficult then rooting a device, it's not easy to do what they do, it takes a lot of time and effort. Which is why I'm so thankful to all developers helping with this project!

[nevergonnauseth]

^we can eventually have a fully flashable version of android running, its just the fact that do you really want to flash your device to a barely working release? It's easier to just test it out using haret.

[WoZZeR999]

There's no internal memory drivers yet (AFAIK), so that's why everything is done on SD cards now. Also, when you run haret, you are running the full OS, it's not emulated, so except for access times (if that's the problem, get a cheap class 8 or class 10 micro-sd) you won't see much of a difference.

[gTen]

Originally Posted by sjs01

This actually is not just a ROM, this is developers who are porting android to our phones using a type of linux I believe.

Now for your question, since this is not ROM development it is a lot more difficult as WoZZeR999 said they have to create, or port these drivers from one operating system to another, they have to change code, this isn't just rooting your device, or for the TP2 unlocking the device, this is the developers writing, or porting code. We can't have an actual android on our device I don't think, all we can have is linux running what looks like android (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). So you see what these developers do is a lot more difficult then rooting a device, it's not easy to do what they do, it takes a lot of time and effort. Which is why I'm so thankful to all developers helping with this project!

It is not emulating android..you are actually running full android..only issue is every phone is different hardware wise and they must be mapped to work by trial and error/reverse engineering. If we had the full documentation from htc for TP2 it would be cake. As for flashing, it requires redoing the bootloader I think.

[aman1127]

Originally Posted by sjs01

This actually is not just a ROM, this is developers who are porting android to our phones using a type of linux I believe.

Now for your question, since this is not ROM development it is a lot more difficult as WoZZeR999 said they have to create, or port these drivers from one operating system to another, they have to change code, this isn't just rooting your device, or for the TP2 unlocking the device, this is the developers writing, or porting code. We can't have an actual android on our device I don't think, all we can have is linux running what looks like android (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). So you see what these developers do is a lot more difficult then rooting a device, it's not easy to do what they do, it takes a lot of time and effort. Which is why I'm so thankful to all developers helping with this project!

Perfect.Thanks!

[aldamon]

Originally Posted by WoZZeR999

There's no internal memory drivers yet (AFAIK), so that's why everything is done on SD cards now. Also, when you run haret, you are running the full OS, it's not emulated, so except for access times (if that's the problem, get a cheap class 8 or class 10 micro-sd) you won't see much of a difference.

The biggest reason I want to see internal memory support is I don't trust my card to last in the long term. I think the internal memory is higher quality than my A-DATA Class 6 card and will be less likely to crash or die on me.

[ajh16]

Originally Posted by sjs01

We can't have an actual android on our device I don't think, all we can have is linux running what looks like android (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

Just to clarify a little, Android is essentially (if not actually) a linux distro. Most of the releases for the TP2 have been based on XDAndroid which is a particular variant of the Android project which is itself based off the linux core.

There are actually some people who have built on the official google Android tree, but I think XDAndroid offers some additional helpful features for developing and really there isn't a whole lot of reason that I know of to use vanilla Android over XDAndroid. As an interesting piece of trivia, the CDMA branch has actually changed during the course of the project too when it jumped back in to the GSM branch. Unless you are a big linux/open source buff though, I wouldn't get too worked up over which branch is which, generally whatever is linked in the main thread should be the most featureful and probably the best for general use. But this is "real" Android.