Android 3.0 Honeycomb Preview Image v04 - 2/7/2011

First of all I have to thank the CM people, especially mbm, nemith, fattire and cvpcs for their work on gingerbread which helped me a lot in understanding where to look and what to patch.

The whole thing is based on the honeycomb preview emulator images, some of the B&N modules+driver, pieces from the upcoming CM7 and manual patching ARM assembler in libraries, writing ugly scripts to hack around various issues, a lot of time and many brain cells.


Use this on your own risk. I'm not responsible for any damages. This is not meant as a primetime ready rom. This is a preview after all.


The unzipped image is around 3.5gb and fits on 4GB SD cards.

MD5 (nookhoney04.img.zip) = 27396e63396a59a25f5d6fdbe0341276
http://www.rbrune.de/nookhoney04.img.zip.torrent
http://www.rbrune.de/nookhoney04.img.zip



Changelog

v04 - 02/07/2011

• increased touchscreen sensitivity and made touchscreen more usable close to the borders (kernel change)
• fixed heap size issue to get much more programs running (e.g. nook app, kindle app, etc.)

v03 - 02/05/2011

• fixed screen turning animations and previews in taskswitcher
• sd card access and secure storage support
• turned off the debug screen flashes and vibrator
• added display timings
• sd card image now usable on 4gb cards
• changed to a self compiled kernel to make these things work
• reduced compressed image size

v02 - 02/02/2011

• sound support
• patched in some graphics improvements. Can play non-hd videos from m.youtube.com
• sdcard storage

v01 - 02/01/2011

• initial release

Status

What works:

• Graphics acceleration
• Accelerometer
• Wireless!
• Touchscreen
• Buttons
• Sleep/Wakeup
• Sound

Known issues:

• The accelerometer behaves funky. Will try to fix this.
• The Gallery app crashes when opening an image. Not my fault, it's broken in the emulator from google too.

Doesn't work:

• DSP e.g. no hardware video decoding (and will possibly never work before the AOSP release)

FAQ

Q: Why?
A: I thought it would be fun. It was and still is. And now developers have an actual device to test their apps on instead of relying on the slow emulator.

Q: How?
A: I'm planning to write a blog post. Mostly learning how Android works, debugging, patching, reusing binaries from different sources, finding easy ways to reach a goal, try and error, a lot of brain power.

Q: During boot I get stuck at the Android screen with the blinking cursor.
A: It seems to be a timing issue with mounting the partitions. Sometimes rebooting helps to get it booting. If not a different SD card might to the trick.

Q: Why is there no Market app installed?
A: There's no legal way to distribute the google apps with a ROM.

Q: Angry Birds, Nook reader, Kindle app?
A: Yes.

Q: I want to port Honeycomb to device xyz... send me the instructions how to do that now!
A: I like the 'I' in that sentence - but there are no instructions, no source, no nothing. Learn and read about Android, Android porting, making custom roms, embedded systems, ARM assembly, driver programming, programming in general, the Linux Kernel and much more - and when you're comfortable and have experience with all of that come back and do your port.

Q: Can you port Honeycomb to device xyz?
A: I don't have xyz. And even if device xyz would magically appear at my front door doesn't necessarily mean I'll have the time and motivation to port anything to it.

Q: I want to use a different kernel what changes did you make in the kernel?
A: https://github.com/rbrune/nook_kernel

Q: Where can I donate?
A: I don't want any money. If you want to put your money to good use donate to a humanitarian organization and/or the EFF.

--
Rafael Brune

A Children's Book

So Many Zeroes!

Blue had his V2, all shiny and GNU, and wanted to send it, but stopped to review.
"What would this ware weigh, if zipped up today? Should it not be much larger than the SDK?"
And yet it was bigger (nearly one-half a gigger!), but Blue still released it with vim and with vigor.
"A drive is a drive, at any old size! But a drive is alive when its zero'ed to thrive!"
So Blue packered his tracks with a /dev/zero-whacker. And then that blue cracker, he launched his bittracker...
And he ripped, and he zipped (but he didn't encrypt), until it was scripted, and that's when he shipped it!
It was plain to see-- that his brand-new V3-- was shiny and tiny and better. Whoopie!
In fact the whole thing was down to 180. A number of megs that was far, far less weighty.
And now when the Rommers all rom their romses, and now when the Singers all sing their songses,
their image of Blue will be bigger and taller,
and installers they image will be *many* megs smaller.

Iridox said:

There are a LOT of devices in CM7's stable. In order for them to launch even an RC, each has to be working or near-working, which takes a lot of effort.

Also, from what I understand, Gingerbread has a few critical bugs that the CM team is attempting to fix before committing to a formal release. It's a choice not to put it out now, not a lack of skill or talent.

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

That's right. There could have been a release in early Jan but while the demo video would have been neato, the build itself would have been WAY too early. And then it would have been a month of "IS IT READY? IS IT READY NOW? Why isn't there sound? Where's the accelerometer? Why is the keyboard so screwy?" etc etc.

CM has a rule not to release until it's 100% hardware compliant-- that's how CM got a reputation for being so great. That said, the nook CM team has been working with blue in the last few days, so what you're seeing in his release today has several parts from cm7 in it (as he noted in the original post). CM7 also does have sound working, ext4 support, and other hardware and build-process fixes that were impossible to migrate in blue's timeframe (or did not apply w/o the source). Those will be in cm7 (it's two bugs away from full hardware support), and when the source is released for honeycomb, I've no doubt the work will be leveraged into that quickly. Which is good because as you can see, HC and NC fit together very well.

In other words, this has been time well spent, and you're seeing some of the fruits of that project today.

Looks like you're gonna make the front page of engadget and the other sites again

Heres a Mirror to v04:
http://android.stolenrobot.com/NookColor/Honeycomb/nookhoney04.img.zip

Here are some basic instructions on how to flash it:

Windows Instructions
Download Win32DiskImager.exe
Download the file in the first post and extract the img from the zip
Run Win32DiskImager and make sure you pick the drive letter corresponding to your MicroSD card
Click the Folder icon and locate the img file you extracted earlier
Click on Write and then wait...

Once its done remove the SD card from your computer
Power off your nook color and insert the MicroSD you just prepared
Power On your Nook Color and wait for it to load

Welcome to Honeycomb!

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=936995

updated, now with sound support!