[Q] Android development

[derek4484]

Let's say that I wanted to get into android rom development, what would be a good place to start to learn. I've downloaded several e-books about android development, but they all pertain to writing applications for android OS, not really getting into modding the OS itself. I suspect I'd need to learn about linux then translate that knowledge to android?

Anybody have any good places to start or good reference materials?

It appears that none of the cyanogenmod team is even going to do anything with the Captivate, they're all working on I9000 and Vibrant, totally ignoring the Captivate. So, I thought I'd get in there and try and learn.

 

[atinm]

Building Android from source - their own site is the best for instructions on how to build android: http://source.android.com/

Building Captivate requires downloading the sources, building the kernel using the build_kernel.sh after you've fixed the toolchain paths. Or you can just use the usual linux kernel building method that the script actually does underneath.

Then you need to build eclair (or froyo). Samsung has opensourced most of the code but not all so you need to figure out how to merge vanilla eclair source into Samsung's tree, and build it. There is a readme in the source from Samsung about what to change in the build files.

You're going to be doing a lot of googling . . . I haven't figured out all the details of the Samsung eclair build so you're on your own there. Maybe others can chime in.

-Atin

 

[derek4484]

Building Android from source - their own site is the best for instructions on how to build android: http://source.android.com/

Building Captivate requires downloading the sources, building the kernel using the build_kernel.sh after you've fixed the toolchain paths. Or you can just use the usual linux kernel building method that the script actually does underneath.

Then you need to build eclair (or froyo). Samsung has opensourced most of the code but not all so you need to figure out how to merge vanilla eclair source into Samsung's tree, and build it. There is a readme in the source from Samsung about what to change in the build files.

You're going to be doing a lot of googling . . . I haven't figured out all the details of the Samsung eclair build so you're on your own there. Maybe others can chime in.

-Atin

Thanks. Thats what I'm talking about, a lot of what you said seems Greek to me. I'd like to learn how to do all that. I guess, just read a lot from the google source website?

 

[atinm]

My advice would be to first learn how to go muck in the linux kernel and the Android sources in general. The Captivate code has been hacked some by Samsung so it doesn't quite follow all the rules about where files are supposed to go (there is no vendor tree for example) but at least it is a start. The google source site is the best for instructions on how to do vanilla stuff that's not hardware specific. Google around for more specific instructions related to the particular problem you are trying to solve after that.

Building working stuff at this level isn't easy. Unless you are somewhat experienced or willing to spend a lot of time learning and making mistakes, I'd say leave this to people who have some experience at this level and come back to it when building for the Captivate is well understood and the knowledge has been distributed enough so lots of people can help you when you have specific questions (no one likes answering general "how to" stuff on a device specific thread).

-Atin