Announcing Droidora - - - HELP WANTED

[Disco Devil]

Sounding great so far, thanks for the work..


Any chance of a specific guide/tutorial for those of us less well versed in all the sudo command alchemy..?


Thanks.

 

[Phelsumania]

I think those of us who are not well verse in all the sudo command alchemy should probbly stay clear of this one and leave it till the guys that know what there doing to perfect it first.


You know if something goes tits up were gonna have right nightmare trying to sort out any unexpeted errors we occur or create.

 

[Dave1234]

Hi guys ive just packed together a tar.bz2 file which works with sd installer (mainly)

Cyberworm mailed me yesterday about doing a version of the SD installer for Droidora, so I'll be looking into this in the next few days (I'm a bit busy at the moment).


Once I have something I'll post it here.

 

[SNESFAN]

i got this going after some trail and error.... one thing I was trying to do was boot from sd with the r trigger boot.... kept erroring out... then tied to boot normal and low and behold the android splash sreen greeted me. Something went wrong on first boot but on second boot got the android desktop. I think it was something to do with it not being able to leave sleep mode setting the timeout higher seemed to fix it.


Question... is there a data/userdata partition or is it just stored in system at the time being?


anyway great work! going to play with it some more when I get some more time.

 

[Cyberworm]

Thanks everyone for your help .


I'm currently working on a nice way to make the archive compatible with SD installer.


@Dave1234: since the SD installer requires root-access, do you think it is possible to automate the permission setting (chmod 777 / chmod 6755)?


@johnsongrantr: at the time being everything is stored in the system (aka 'internal memory'). Hopefully someday Droidora will be able to use the second SD slot.


@all: I found something on the android-porting mailing list that may help to remove the touchscreen inaccuracy.


€dit: Okay I'm running into some problem here. The touchscreen fix uses the values of the /etc/pointercal file. So I did run the calibrate tool on the Pandora OS to receive the most current values. I then exported them to the fix but sadly two of the values are so big (they are offset values) that the input is even more inaccurate than before (and with 'more' I mean like two or three screens off). I tried using the values in the pointercal file of the official Pandora image. And guess what? They are exactly the same! kloplop321 on the IRC channel told me his values and they are the same, too!


So now I'm looking for some pointercal values. Please post them. I wonder just how the Pandora OS handles these values...

 

[PokeParadox]

This should help: http://code.google.com/p/penjin/source/browse/trunk/SimpleJoy.cpp#323


It took a lot of rooting around but this is code I managed to get working to get TS positions from the screen in Penjin, which is using pointercal values .

 

[bagmouse7]

It is working great, I followed "meandu229's" instructions above and it worked perfectly.


The first start up on the SD card the system halted with a kernel panic error, but I restarted and it booted correctly the second time.


I was able to attach to wireless, use the web browser and sync my email from gmail.


Super cool and fun to play with!

 

[meandu229]

i got this going after some trail and error.... one thing I was trying to do was boot from sd with the r trigger boot.... kept erroring out... then tied to boot normal and low and behold the android splash sreen greeted me. Something went wrong on first boot but on second boot got the android desktop. I think it was something to do with it not being able to leave sleep mode setting the timeout higher seemed to fix it.

The reason for this is Daves sd installer adds a autoboot.txt and a boot.txt for booting normal pandora OS, when you held down R it tried to boot from the boot.txt which we didnt overwrite, simply delete the boot.txt and rename the autoboot.txt to boot.txt if you want this behaviour.


@dave1234 I was meaning to email you on this I edited the script in your PND to make it work with this with minimal changes,but it wasnt very nice and im not too good at making pnds and also I didnt I thought you may want to keep control of this, All I did was a few find and replaces.


Would you make a droidora sd installer or just add a choice to the normal one,


@DaMummy Ill try and make one soon but not that much to show off yet, most apps dont open.

 

[Cyberworm]

I noticed that when using the SD installer chmod the su program alone isn't enough. I don't have root access. I need to replace it manually and set the permission again. I thought the SD installer uses root access?

 

[meandu229]

Whats next on the checklist to do cyber? do you know why most apps just close?

 

[Cyberworm]

They do? Haven't seen that yet. You could try to check logcat via terminal emulator. But for that you need to manually replace the su program and set the permissions again. I'm currently working on the touchscreen and I'm making progress.

 

[Dave1234]

@Dave1234: since the SD installer requires root-access, do you think it is possible to automate the permission setting (chmod 777 / chmod 6755)?

Yes I can do that.

@dave1234 I was meaning to email you on this I edited the script in your PND to make it work with this with minimal changes,but it wasnt very nice and im not too good at making pnds and also I didnt I thought you may want to keep control of this, All I did was a few find and replaces.


Would you make a droidora sd installer or just add a choice to the normal one,

Another option I'm considering is just having a simple script instead of a PND. The reason being, Cyberworm could set it up so that it is downloaded as part of the "compiled" directory. Then you have everything you need in one place: root filesystem, kernel, boot script and installer. I'm interested in what people think about this option.

I noticed that when using the SD installer chmod the su program alone isn't enough. I don't have root access. I need to replace it manually and set the permission again. I thought the SD installer uses root access?

The installer runs as root, but any commands that you run after it, such as the chmod, will run as your own user unless you use su to switch to root or use sudo.

 

[meandu229]

sounds like a good idea having just a script actually especially in this pre-alpha state, would have kernel+boot txts inside /boot in the rootfs tarball, then just a 2 file download put in same folder and ru script,

 

[Cyberworm]

Another option I'm considering is just having a simple script instead of a PND. The reason being, Cyberworm could set it up so that it is downloaded as part of the "compiled" directory. Then you have everything you need in one place: root filesystem, kernel, boot script and installer. I'm interested in what people think about this option.

Hmm, if that means that you can run the script even outside of the Pandora, then sure, why not.

The installer runs as root, but any commands that you run after it, such as the chmod, will run as your own user unless you use su to switch to root or use sudo.

I do the chmod with sudo but I can't run su on Android, saying that the SUID 10003 (or xxxx7, sometimes xxxx8) doesn't have permission. But I don't think it's related to the SD installer, I manually extracted the rootfs.tar.bz2 onto the partition and get the same problem. Maybe it is something with EXT3 ?


€dit: Okay, that's weird. I did everything the manual way, creating an EXT2 partition, etc. but I sitll get the error. I think I broke something...


€dit: All right, it seems the rooted su program isn't anymore copied into the rootfs folder. Maybe I should delete the android platform files and redownload them for a clean compilation. Or make sure that the old su gets deleted before copying the new one.

 

[Dave1234]

I have a VERY early version of an install script here. Copy it into the "compiled" directory, cd to that directory and do this:

gunzip install.sh.gz

chmod u+x install.sh

(I had to compress it, otherwise the board wouldn't let me attach it)



Then you can run it like this:

sudo ./install.sh <dev file>

Where <dev file> is the device special file for the SD card you want to install to. For example:

sudo ./install.sh /dev/sdd

As I say, this is a very early version and has had very little testing, all of it on Ubuntu 10.04.


Also be aware that if you specify the wrong device special file you could damage your system.


So as always, proceed with caution.

 

[Cyberworm]

Thanks Dave, I shall give it a try tomorrow.


I found the error regardin su: I foolishly modified the makefile on the wrong part and so breaking everything . I got the old from one the repository now everything should run fine. (all this never left my computer though, just doing some smalltalk on what I am doing )

 

[Cyberworm]

Hey Dave, I'm testing the installer right now but there seems to be a problem. I use the Pandora in SD Mass Storage Mode and the target SD shows as /dev/sdb. So when I do 'sudo ./installer.sh /dev/sdb' I get following error message:

Could not read the device "/dev/sdb"

 

[Cyberworm]

As I understood it the script asks for the whole card, not only for one partition. But let's await Dave's answer.


I have good news:


Touchscreen inaccuracy is gone! I uploaded everything to the repository.


I'll start working on my thesis again so it may become quieter here. But I really want to get the graphics acceleration working sometimes .

 

[Dave1234]

As I understood it the script asks for the whole card, not only for one partition. But let's await Dave's answer.

Yes that's right. It should be the whole device. Check if any partition on sdb is mounted. You'll probably find that at least one is and the script can't unmount it because something is using it.

 

[PokeParadox]

As I understood it the script asks for the whole card, not only for one partition. But let's await Dave's answer.


I have good news:


Touchscreen inaccuracy is gone! I uploaded everything to the repository.


I'll start working on my thesis again so it may become quieter here. But I really want to get the graphics acceleration working sometimes .

Ah I'm glad! Did my info help at all?


Also I have another suggestion. You may have heard of the N900 phone, well it is very similar to the Pandora and it also has an Android port named NitDroid... it occurs to me that you may be able to share some of the work they have already done to improve your Droidora!