[TECH] GETTING ANDROID RUNNING NATIVELY ON THE WETAB
2011 August 08This is a short summary of my last Weekend hacking on getting Android-X86 to run as smoothly on the WeTab as possible.
A first search on the web showed me that the Sparta build should run smoothly on the WeTab, so that was the first I tried.
This image seemed to work mostly. Touchscreen works, but every touch is registered twice, so it's basically unusable. ALso, the screenresolution is just half of what it could be.
Next I tried the TegaV2 image which is supposed to work on most Asus hardware. I don't know if the WeTab is Asus hardware, but at least the Ubuntu which I have installed on it loads the asus-laptop.ko kernel module.
Unfortunately, the TegaV2 image had some pros and cons.
Pros: screen resolution much better.
Cons: Touchscreen doesn't work, softkey doesn't work.
The first was easy to fix: load the hid-multitouch.ko kernel module.
The second was almost as easy: load the asus-laptop.ko kernel module; unfortunately it didn't come with the image, so I had to compile it manually. Learning and doing it cost me about half a day, but by that time I had a basic understanding of compiling anything inside the android-x86 source tree.
For reference:
root@localhost:android-source/ # cat buildspec.mk
TARGET_PRODUCT:=tegav2
TARGET_STRIP:=1
root@localhost:android-source/ # . build/envsetup.sh
root@localhost:android-source/ # lunch tegav2-eng
root@localhost:android-source/ # make -C kernel O=$OUT/obj/kernel menuconfig
root@localhost:android-source/ # cp $OUT/obj/kernel/.config ./device/tegatech/tegav2/tegav2_defconfig
root@localhost:android-source/ # make kernel
Now you have the compiled kernel and modules in out/target/product/tegav2/ and can copy them over to your system.
In the ramdisk I added three lines to load the modules hid-multitouch, sparse-keymad and asus-laptop and added the line 'key 226 BACK' to system/usr/keylayout/de.kl to bind the BACK function to the softkey.
Everything sound easy so far? Just one-and-a-half days of hacking through the Android sources and compiling, copying, rebooting the WeTab and testing.
This concludes part 1 of my experience with Android. There's more that happened on the weekend but that's for the next time :-)
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