These are my rough working notes for my talk about building android. There are some issues with these notes especially with information regarding the install of Java, so use these at your own risk.

I will be working on a corrected document with these issues corrected. Also the following links will be useful:

Android Source
Android SDK
Factory Images for Nexus Phones
Binary drivers for Nexus Phones

Building Android

What do you need:

Linux box google recommends either ubuntu or Mac OS X 10.6 for the purpose of this talk we're going to be using ubuntu 10.04 as it there are a number of difficulties setting up the build environment on the mac.

Setting up the build environment:

Firstly we need to install Java, and not OpenJDK.

As Java is no longer distributed with ubuntu we need to add a repository that contains Java 6.

https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/java/

Unfortunately Oracle changed the licensing for the redistribution of Java, which means we have a couple of options.

Install it manually or via a repository for this talk I'm going to use the repository provided by duinsoft (Duinsoft is a respected member of the ubuntu community in the Netherlands.)

http://www.duinsoft.nl/packages.php?t=en

put the line
deb http://www.duinsoft.nl/pkg debs all
in the file /etc/apt/sources.list, either using Software Sources from your System Menu or by editing the file in an editor (as root)
or:
put this line in a file named (e.g.) duinsoft.list in the directory /etc/apt/sources.list.d
import the gpg key with the command (all on one line)

enter the commands (two lines)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-sun-jre

--

Once we've got Java installed, we need to install the Android SDK from http://developer.android.com/index.html

Unfortunately, once we have installed the SDK we then have to download a bit more, and the only reason for downloading this is so that we can get the binaries adb and fastboot

More about these later.

Now we need to get the rest of the build environment going.

for this we need to install a number of packages that are needed:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential \
zip curl zlib1g-dev libc6-dev lib32ncurses5-dev ia32-libs \
x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib32readline5-dev lib32z-dev \
libgl1-mesa-dev g++-multilib mingw32 tofrodos python-markdown \
libxml2-utils xsltproc libx11-dev:i386

Now next we need to get the source, now this can take quite a while:

we need to get a program called repo, and place this in bin, in your home directory.

to do this:

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ PATH=~/bin:$PATH

$ curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo
$ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

repo is a front end for git that is used to manage the google source.

we need to make directory to contain our android source code

$ mkdir android

$ cd android

Now
$ repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest

Now we run the command

$ repo sync

this will take a bit.

Building it

In reality it's pretty hard to build android for anything other than the google supported platforms i.e. the Nexus S, the Galaxy Nexus, and their new tablet the Nexus 7

For the purpose of this talk we're going to be building for the Galaxy Nexus.

As not all of the source is open we need to download some propriatary drivers which google do distribute.

https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/

we need to download binaries for wifi & blue tooth, graphics, the orientation sensor, and gsm drivers.

Unfortunately google is unable to distribute the drivers for the camera but there are ways and means to get those from your handset before we build.

each of these binary blobs has an installer script which we run.

Now to build the source

firstly we need to run a script to set up your source tree

so in the directory we've downloaded the source in we run

$ source build/envsetup.sh

now let's have lunch

the command to start the build process is called lunch.DO.

so if we enter in lunch without any flags we will get the build menu.

or we can enter in

$ lunch full_maguro

now lunch is pretty much our configuration script,

now we run

make -j4

Now I'm not going to build today as it will take quite a while (for example on my machine at home it can take up to 55 minutes to build.)

Installing it on your handset.

--

firstly there are a number of things you need to do, but note, this will erase the handset.

Remember how we installed the android sdk earlier,

firstly on your handset you need to turn on USB debugging, plug the phone into your computer and then type the command

$ adb device

Note: on ubuntu you may not have enough privileges to access the phone via the usb port, you can either run adb as root, or do the following:

The recommended approach is to create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules (as the root user) and to copy the following lines in it.must be replaced by the actual username of the user who is authorized to access the phones over USB.

# adb protocol on maguro/toro (Galaxy Nexus)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="04e8", ATTR{idProduct}=="6860", MODE="0600", OWNER=""

now

$ adb device

and we should see the device

We need to get the phone into it's bootloader and we can do this by doing:

$ adb reboot bootloader

Now if you've not done it we need to unlock the bootloader.

NOTE: this will erase your phone! and reset it to factory settings.

we do this by issuing the command:

$ fastboot oem unlock

once the phone has finished wiping itself we can install the build we have made with

$ fastboot -w flashall

reverting back to a factory build, Now as the android open source project doesn't include things like the google applications, and getting them installed is a little out of scope for this talk, you will probably want to return to a normal build.

We can download these from https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

I'd reccomend on the Galaxy Nexus using the takju build as this is the first of their builds to get updated.

Oce this has all been downloaded uncompress the tarball and in it's directory run the following commands.

$ adb reboot bootloader
$ ./flash-all.sh

and the phone will be reverted to a stock google install.

And if you want to relock your bootloader just run the command

$ fastboot oem lock

-

There are other community builds of android that you can also build, and these generally use the same process.

questions?

Well now that my site is back online, what do I want to do with my site. I’m not really sure.

Most likely I’ll post my android builds, radio stuff and things like that.

~

New server, new site, new content.