Android gingerbread in a pnd?

[TrashyMG]

That won't really help anything, my work on this is more or less over, this is my least favorite project of all.

Well thanks for your effort so far and I really appreciate it. Android is good for a few purposes, It gives me a few apps that can't be got from Angstrom.. Netflix and such.


However for Gaming and general day to day utility, I can get more out of native Linux and where I will always focus mainly on myself.

 

[Mr_Loon]

Any advances on this at all then? I'd love to test this, as I have a hacked dumb-ish phone running Android, and would like to try it on the Pandora. However, I am nervous that I'll lose about 16GB of stuff off my 32GB SD Card. If it's still dodgy and prone to trashing cards then I'll give it a miss for now.

I've probably spent about 10 hours playing with Android on Pandora using a couple of low capacity SD cards I had no other use for, and have not experienced any sort of file corruption nor seen any reported in this thread. However, it wouldn't do any harm to do a backup first just in case. FWIW the cards are formatted to FAT32.

That won't really help anything, my work on this is more or less over, this is my least favorite project of all.

Many thanks for everything you've done, IMHO Android as an optional / secondary OS really adds something to the Pandora.


It's also been a very pleasant surprise to see how well Android software runs on the Pandora and how many of the games use the DPad / buttons with little or no configuration required (perhaps I've just been lucky there).


Do you mind if I ask why this is your least favourite project?

 

[WizardStan]

Hmm... How can I throw money at this to ensure a consistent development well into next year....

Notaz has a paypal account I guess.

Does he? I've been trying to throw money at him for months and haven't figured out how.

 

[TrashyMG]

 

[Farox]

I think Notaz have done an Amazing work for the Pandora community...i think to donate some money to him again (yes i have already done in the past)...even if he don't want to develop more the Android_PND...


Hope someone could pick up his work and continue.

 

[fusion_power]

For everyone who hasn't tried it:


Here is a quick video of the latest Android running on the 1GHz DM3730 Pandora (stock speed).

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hHPxE9om3Hc?feature=oembed

This is sad but I'm sure, other Devs will continue your work for the Pandora with pleasure, Android is just to interesting to let it go.

 

[EvilDragon]

Is there a way to change the size of the created internal image?


I wanted to keep it small and install most apps and games on the second SD Card, but it seems most of them only want to be installed in the internal memory

 

[notaz]

Is there a way to change the size of the created internal image?


I wanted to keep it small and install most apps and games on the second SD Card, but it seems most of them only want to be installed in the internal memory

You could use dd with seek to enlarge the file and maybe resize2fs can then resize the filesystem in it.


Another method would be to create a new file, mkfs filesystem there, mount both with loop and copy files manually.

 

[EvilDragon]

Ah, it's just an ext-image?


Yeah, then I'll get it to work

 

[apersonthinks]

As this has superuser, you can always force move the application to the second sd card after its installed using link2sd from the android market.

 

[mcobit]

After experimenting a little further, I now disable zram in angstrom with swapoff -a, then activate a 512mb swapfile.


If I start android now, Games, that were loading to dead before now run pretty good.


Still long loading but not crashing.


Hope that helps some people with 256mb ram Pandoras

 

[Cyberworm]

This is sad but I'm sure, other Devs will continue your work for the Pandora with pleasure, Android is just to interesting to let it go.

That's what I thought, too. Too bad there's mostly wanting and wishing only and hardly any working.

 

[mcobit]

"Going Nuts" from playstore works, but doesn't display textures. It has just black polygons with red dots on them.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

After experimenting a little further, I now disable zram in angstrom with swapoff -a, then activate a 512mb swapfile.


If I start android now, Games, that were loading to dead before now run pretty good.


Still long loading but not crashing.


Hope that helps some people with 256mb ram Pandoras

Interesting.


So zram magic seems to cease under some conditions :/.

 

[Mr_Loon]

After experimenting a little further, I now disable zram in angstrom with swapoff -a, then activate a 512mb swapfile.

Sorry for the noob question but could you link to a guide on how to set up a 512mb swap file.


Also when you disable zram is it enabled again on reboot or do you need a command to turn it back on?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

The way he did, it's enabled at next reboot.


The swap file can be managed with extend utils :


http://pandorawiki.org/Extend_Utils


You can also create a "true" swap, but you have to re-partition a SD card.

 

[slaeshjag]

You can also use this.

 

[Mr_Loon]

Thanks guys, I'll give that a go.

 

[fusion_power]

You can also use this.

Yeah, I use this little tool on my normal Pandora to have more stable Browsing with Firefox. It needs the root PW and has to enabled every reboot but I think it is good to be on the save side, since Swap on SD shouldn't be enabled all the time.


It sounds, like Angstrom benefits from a real Swap File instead of the nice little ZRam Trick. I wonder how all the Android Devices solved the Swap issue. Do they all have permanantly acivated Swap files on their Flash memory internals? Or just more Ram for ZRAM tricks? Because ZRAM seems for me more save for long term use than permanent Swapping on a Flash storage Medium.

 

[mcobit]

Well, I'm doing it the hard way, dd a new file, then format to swap, then swapon