Archive for September, 2010

Sorry we were down due to network issues

Friday, September 10th, 2010

When we moved to our temporary location last week, we used an loaned GBIC for the fiber connection. A Converter that was supposed to replace that sadly had the wrong type and didn’t work when we had to give the GBIC back. Now a friend was so kind to find and loan us an GBIC and we are now back online. Hopefully for good.

We apologize, again, for the inconvenience.

Froyo Alpha1 a quick summary

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

It looks like we’ll be trying to get an alpha2 out sooner than we thought.
There are various issues we’ve found.
The most annoying is the random shutdown which was caused by a typo. There are also some other problems with the initramfs not working 100% as we’d like (serial debugging doesn’t activet or if it activates the kernel log is missing, the menu.lst is not generated/extended automatically, etc.)

We’ll keep you posted.

For more info on what’s been discovered, fixed or still open please check this report on our developer pages.

Cool input device for Archos units sighted

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

We just heard from JBMM about this cool concept device by AlphaUI.

It seems to be a keyboard strapped to the back of the device. A technology called BackTyping. But see for yourself.

Apparently they are about to launch a Beta test of their hardware for the A5IT.
So if you live anywhere near Paris or Brussels. (They won’t ship by mail and I can’t justify the costs flying there! While I want this soo bad to try it with all our Froyo/MeeGo/Angstrom images!) :-(

Thomas, your friendly ArchDruid ;)

openAOS brings you: FroYo alpha1 for Archos 5 IT!

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

We had some early development snapshots already, but for an real alpha version we said we want to fix at least WiFi and SGX. For WiFi we even had an bounty and I guess this image is best proof that the bounty has been earned. Furies did the work on it. Thanks to AndAppStore for sponsoring the bounty!

Well we don’t want to make the tension unbearable here is the image:

FroYo Alpha1 for Archos5IT

This also needs this boot-menu update: zImage and initramfs

Enjoy your FroYo! Here are the much easier new instructions for setting up the boot-menu if you haven’t yet.

This image needs the following line added to menu.lst (do NOT use notepad! use an editor capable of proper unix line endings!):

openAOS Froyo alpha|/dev/sda1|/rootfsfroyo.img|/init

This all comes with a bootnote, a rather extensive one:

  • This is alpha grade software intended for developers and tech-savy testers.
  • There are still many unresolved issues and problems.
  • If you ‘just want FroYo’ – this is not for you! Wait until it’s stable and usable.
  • If you don’t plan to give us feedback – this is not for you! Wait until it’s stable and usable.
  • If you expect everything to work – this is not for you! Wait until it’s stable and usable.
  • After this has been said, thank you very much you seriously want to help us with this. We appreciate this very much as we really need every help we can get!
  • If you notice anything that doesn’t feel right, please file an ticket and
    use Android 2.2 Alpha2 as the target milestone
    and Android 2.2 – alpha1 as the version
  • Please do the same if you want some feature included or something improved
  • First boot will take very long! Keep your USB cable connected.
    • First the rootfs gets unzipped (You can unzip it on your PC that’s much faster!)
    • The Android cache is compiled – this can also take a while, just watch the boot logo while this happens.
  • Please join the mailing-list to discuss this image!
  • Want to see if someone is online right now to ask a question or discuss? Join us on IRC!
  • Yes sound does not work, sorry. Next Alpha maybe.
  • Don’t want to install the alpha but still want to help? Consider donating to the openAOS project!

¹ please note that the default Ångström image needs to be modified to work with this kernel! adding the command ‘fbset -nonstd 0′ could fix at least part of the issue during boot process. Expect updates on this soon.

We’re back!

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Sorry the downtime lasted way longer than anticipated.

But now we should be able to run the servers in an even better environment.

We apologize again for the inconvenience!

Stay tuned for FroYo Alpha1 real soon now!

PS: Some notes from our server migration:

  • BEWARE of cgroups-bin on debian! It breaks lxc! Mount cgroups manually or through fstab!
    (The error message in this context was ‘lxc-start: No such file or directory – failed to rename cgroup /mnt/cgroups/cpu/20945->/mnt/cgroups/cpu/openaos’ – once we purged cgroups-bin it worked instantly)