20081218

Triple Booting the Neo FreeRunner




Hi everyone,

It's been a while since my last post, so I must apologize for that. Things have been very busy since November.

However, as some of you may already know, I was also experimenting with the Android operating system on my FreeRunner directly after the source code was released. In fact, I was arguably the first person to compile Android for the ARMv4T architecture. Thanks to the work of the community, it is now possible to run Android on the FreeRunner using KoolU's sources.

The private Android repository is to be merged with the official public repository sometime in Q4 2008, while the first release featuring an on-screen-keyboard will be Q1 2009. The areas I would like to concentrate on are WiFi, and Glamo improvements.

In any event, I'm currently triple-booting the FreeRunner with the latest OM image (or FDOM image), Android, and Gentoo. I'm planning using the Gentoo install for debugging things that will eventually go into the OM and Android images.

I'm using an 8GB uSD card with 4 primary partitions:

/dev/mmcblk0p1: MokoData (vfat) 5 GB
/dev/mmcblk0p2: AndroidData (ext2) 512 MB
/dev/mmcblk0p3: MokoRoot (ext2) 512 MB
/dev/mmcblk0p4: GentooRoot (ext2) 2 GB

Android is of course installed to the 'rootfs' partition in nand flash. MokoData contains uImage-android (from Sean McNeil), uImage-2008.9.bin, and uImage-2008.12.bin - the latter two are official OpenMoko kernels. I've updated the nand boot menu so that menu_2 boots OM 2008.9, menu_3 boots Android, and menu_4 boots Gentoo.

At some point in the near future, I'm hoping to create a torrent so that the configuration can be downloaded and shared by everyone in the community, but you may have guessed that Free Time(TM) is limited these days.

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