Gen9 GPL source coming soon?

September 12th, 2011

The more observant among our readers might have already noticed that these git repositories appeared today in the official Archos Gitorious account:

And something more verbose and also for the less tech-savvy among our readers:

This will be pretty much the same type of sources like we saw them for the previous generations. (Android/Linux kernel, toolchain, µClibc userspace, …)

One very important bit: this will not be the source-code for the whole firmware. This will only be the sources for which Archos:

  • voluntarily provides those
  • has to provide those due to licensing terms (e.g. GPL)

Just to make this clear: no Android source code is to be expected.

We expect that soon Archos will also provide a SDE firmware for gen9 to enable experimentation with open-source software on this very interesting OMAP4 based hardware. :)

temporary problems with openaos.org email addresses

September 12th, 2011

Hi, just a quick blurb. Emails to addresses @openaos.org and @openpma.org currently experience problems.

This sadly also concerns the mailing lists.

We hope to solve this soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Anoa – First Gingerbread Release for Gen7 and Gen8, based on CM7

August 18th, 2011

We’ve worked hard for it and now openAOS Android Anoa, the first beta grade release is here!

We give you Android 2.3 Gingerbread for gen7 and gen8 hardware, based on Cyanogenmod 7.

The images can be found on our new download server in the release directory.

If you haven’t set up your device to boot multiple operating systems yet then please follow the respective guides for gen7 (A5IT, A48 coming soon) and gen8 (A43, A70, A101).

Please keep in mind that this is not a full replacement firmware it is a community created Android 2.3 adaptation in beta stage. It should work OK but there are still many things missing (e.g. media playback, USB storage). If you find something that is clearly broken then please check if it has been reported yet and if not then please create an issue. DivX118 also summed it up nicely in a forum post.

A list of things adressed in this release (not complete, compared to older preview images):

  • fix browser crash
  • workarround for wake up from deep sleep issue -> disabled deep sleep (increases power consumption though)
  • fix for finding right sdcard device for vold
  • both internal storage and SD card should be visible now
  • new bookmarks (for archos scene)
  • power menu was not easy to get on gen7
  • new CM7 bookmark for G-apps (for more info see also our wiki on this topic)
  • used latest CM7 code
  • headphone switch (not complete yet)
  • lot’s of other things…

Many thanks to all the people who have spent their precious free time on this release: BuBU, divx118, illifant, …

If you are interested in helping and submitting patches, please check the developer pages on openAOS Android and consider joining our IRC channel and the openaos-android mailing list.

Why the release name Anoa? You may ask… Well we felt like bringing back easy to remember names so people know what they are running. Or would you rather try to remember: ‘the stable release of openaos android that came out for gen7 and gen8 and the images were the first ones built in week 33 of 2011 and is based on CM7′? Because that’s actually all encoded in the filename. Anoa it is then! :-)   But don’t get too used to it, the Bull is probably right around the corner… ;)

Updated Gingerbread image for gen8

July 8th, 2011

BuBU has built an image based on the latest openAOS and CM code:

  • improved bluetooth (BT HID confirmed working)
  • workaround for web browser crash
  • default homepage is openaos.org
  • Archos community bookmarks
  • other

The latest image is openaos-gingerbread-gen8-20110708_183154.img.gz (md5sum).
Confirmed working with boot menu version featured here.

If you are new please be warned that this is still experimental and bugs are expected, for installation instructions continue reading here.

Gen7 code compiles but is not ready for public images. If you want to build it yourself for gen7 or gen8 here are some instructions.

New week, new boot menu version

July 5th, 2011

BuBU made significant improvements to the gen8 boot menu, so we’ve decided to make a blog post.

Note that this is still work in progress so you should actually follow (and link to) the boot menu guide on the developer wiki.

http://dev.openaos.org/wiki/SettingUpMultiRootGen8

Most notable recent improvements:

  • new advanced menu which appear in OS selection (which lead to a new menu with debugging (serial stuff), recovery, reboot, disable rooted device, disable comcache)
  • other important feature is check validity for /file.img if does not exists it shows a list of available *.img under storage and it magically fix the menu.lst with the selected entry
  • fixed the touchscreen issue (under debian/other OSes)
  • difference between standard and debug is that the menu for serial appears early in initramfs
  • for both debug/standard you can switch serial… if you selected NONE initially.. u can go back in advanced menu > DEBUGGING to change to Ether or if u selected Ether you can got to same place to change to Both (or None or whatever)
  • Booting off partitions including µSD card partitions
  • IPv6 support in kernel

We plan to bring as many features as possible to the gen7 boot menu too in the near future so stay tuned.

Please report all problems on IRC and or to our issue tracker!

Here are the files for the impatient who know what they are doing:

https://openaos.org/wp-upload/gen8/2011-07-05/