Of the Atrix, XDAndroid, and Kernel.org

Howdy folks. Been a while since the last post, so I thought I’d fire off a quick update about what I’ve been doing personally…

First off, XDAndroid. We’re still doing some work on the gingerbread branch. Michael (emwe) has fixed the GPS library and is currently working on some smaller items, including the proximity and light sensors. He’s currently the one getting most of the work done. We’re still working on the critical crasher for TI devices (non-RHOD) when activating bluetooth. Once that’s done, we can finish/clean up the merges from froyo and make a release.

On a related note, kernel.org is still down. This means, for our project, that we cannot merge any changes from the upstream Android project. Google’s public Android source code was hosted exclusively on kernel.org, so until those services are restored (or Google relocates its git repositories), we cannot pull any of their changes into our forked repositories. Additionally, users are currently unable to download or update our source tree, since the majority of source tree is unmodified Android code.

In the headline, I mention the Motorola Atrix 4G. This is a Tegra-based phone which, of course, runs Android natively. On XDA, there has been an ongoing effort to port CyanogenMod 7 to the Atrix. Since nobody had stepped up to port vanilla Android to the Atrix, I snuck into their development channel on IRC, stole their code, and got (most of) the job done. I plan to release the source tree to the public as soon as kernel.org is restored, or perhaps earlier if I can gather clones of the Android source tree. To be clear, this is going to be targeted at ROM developers (or the “chefs” term I so dislike to use). It’s working extremely well as an everyday phone for me, thanks to the wonderful work of the Atrix Dev Team, but I’m not confident in my solo efforts to bring vanilla Android to their awesome stability. Therefore, I cannot offer proper support for end-users. I’ll be making another post about Atrix stuff after I go public with a released build.