Oh baby! That rocks!
Most of the devices supported by XDANDROID have had both WiFi and 3G working for a while now. In Windows Mobile, there are third party programs that allow you to bridge the 3G connection to an ad-hoc WiFi connection, providing a wireless tether for a notebook computer. After some work last night, I’ve been able to whip up a solution for WiFi-based tethering for Android on our handsets, complete with a friendly GUI. Read on to see what you’ll need to do for this to work on your XDANDROID phone.
Last week, phhusson modified the rootfs init scripts for eclair (and eclairhero) to load the RIL library (libhtcgeneric-ril) from rootfs instead of what is packed in system.sqsh. This solves a minor problem with updating the RIL: there would have to be a new system.sqsh for each RIL update. That’s a problem for users, developers and servers alike. Users would have to spend time and bandwidth downloading a whole new Android bundle for a change to one little library. Developers would have to spend time repacking system.sqsh for that one little change and uploading it to the disto server. The server would spend tons and tons (and I mean tons… upwards of 75GB in the first 24 hours of release) of bandwidth hosting that new bundle.
I’ve started up a build service for libhtcgeneric-ril which occurs entirely on a backend. This means that the products of the build service aren’t directly accessible to users like the rootfs and initramfs builds are. Instead, this one builds a new libhtcgeneric-ril, commits and pushes it to the eclair-rootfs repo, and then the rootfs build service will eventually spit out a new build with the updated libhtcgeneric-ril. End-users can download the roughly-6MB file from the build service and update just the rootfs for the RIL changes.
There’s no fancy frontend or snazzy filesystem images for this one, sorry. You can check out the libhtcgeneric-ril repository on Gitorious, though. Thanks for reading!
That’s right, we have yet another automated method of breaking Android on your WinMo phones! In the same spirit as the rootfs build service, we’ve got the nice, new initramfs build service. See the original post about why we needed the rootfs build service for the exact same reasons behind this build service.