Tag: Froyo

New Froyo Release: FRX07

Here’s a new release for you, folks. This is a major release with a ton of changes, new features, and fixes. Our friend hyc/highlandsun did most of the heavy lifting for this release. Highlights include a rewritten RIL with support for world phones and greatly improved CDMA support; fixes for the media codecs; fixes for MMS on Sprint; increased security with the Superuser app.

A list of changes is included below. The FRX07 system image is available for download now, and will require the use of a new rootfs image, also available now. Additionally, we have a new bundle containing everything needed to enjoy a full FRX07 system.

Note: Due to the incredibly long list of changes, this is a somewhat condensed, terse changelog describing only the overall scope of the changes.FRX07:

  • frameworks/base:
    • Major frameworks changes for CDMA/GSM dual-mode worldphone support. (hyc)
    • Fixes for data connection handling to improve startup time. (hyc)
    • Fixes for wifi handling to avoid issues on hanged drivers. (hyc)
    • Stagefreight (media codecs) fixes. (hyc/viruscrazy)
    • Fixes for Sprint’s wonky MMS markup structure. (hyc)
    • Fix MediaScanner not finding audio files (including ringtones) in system.ext2
  • hardware/libhardware_legacy:
    • Minor GPS driver fixes. (Alex[sp3dev])
    • Rename wifi interfaces to wlan0 on all devices (hyc)
  • hardware/xdandroid-ril: Major RIL refactoring for improved performance on all devices, and added CDMA/GSM dual-mode worldphone support. (hyc)
  • packages/apps/Gallery3D: Switched back to Gallery3D as the gallery app (closes bug #111)
  • packages/apps/Mms: Fixes for Sprint’s wonky MMS markup structure. (hyc)
  • packages/apps/Phone: Fixes for CDMA/GSM dual-mode worldphone support. (hyc)
  • packages/apps/Superuser: Added the Superuser package for authorizing su privileges. This, along with our signed builds, provides greatly increased security for the end user (mostly against malicious apps from the Market).
  • system/extras/su: Added as a dependency for the Superuser package
  • vendor/qcom/android-open: Include missing stagefright codec symbols. (hyc/viruscrazy)

To coincide with the FRX07 system image, the following rootfs changes have been made:

  • init.froyo.rc modifications…
    • Adjust wpa_supplicant service for the new abstraction provided by libhardware_legacy, as well as interface rename
    • Abstract the hciattach service to provide bluetooth support on both chipsets
  • Rename wifi interface to wlan0 on all devices
  • apns-conf.xml updated
  • keymaps completely reorganized, and RHOD end-call key has been remapped to be the Home key in Android.
  • default.prop: set ro.secure=1 to lock down the adb shell – su can be used with the Superuser app to authorize root access in adb if needed.

Dual XDAndroid Releases – FRX06 and new Gingerbread

It’s that time again! And this time we’ve got a release for both froyo and gingerbread.

First of all, our official froyo branch release, FRX06… We’ve got a couple minor changes, backported from Gingerbread:

  • Switched to touch-friendly dialer, along with the VGA layout improvements as seen in Gingerbread
  • Added HSPA icon (for GSM models)

FRX06 is available for download now as a system.ext2 update.

And for Gingerbread, we’ve also got just a couple minor updates:

  • Further tuned keyboard sizing to be useful on VGA (also made the key labels bigger)
  • World-phone settings support (very important for future RIL enhancements especially on CDMA)
  • Enabled HSPA icon (someone on GSM please let me know if it actually works)

The new Gingerbread testing image is also available for download now as a system.ext2 update.

XDAndroid 2.2.2 (Froyo) Build FRX05

Another release!

This time it’s the Froyo branch. We’ve got build FRX05 available for download now. This is a minor release with a major new feature. 🙂

The short list of changes from FRX04 to FRX05…

  • Camera support – both photo and video capture (without sound currently) are working. This depends on kernel support, so only Rhodium and Topaz are supported currently. Huge thanks to Jerome Bruneaux (viruscrazy on XDA) for basically doing all the work.
  • Switch build variants from engineering to user-debug for slight speedup.

There’s no OTA update.zip this time. I accidentally got rid of the FRX04 target files, needed to generate the incremental patches.

Thanks for using XDAndroid!

XDAndroid 2.2.1 Build FRX04

Hello again XDAndroid users!

We’ve got a minor release for you tonight. No, it’s not Gingerbread… We’re releasing XDAndroid 2.2.1 (Froyo) build FRX04, in the forms of both an updated system.ext2 image and an update.zip OTA update package.

List of changes since FRX03:

  • Improved 3D performance, with fixes for WVGA devices (brought to you by [acl]) – IMPORTANT: this requires the accompanying rootfs release from today, 21 Jan.
  • Synced all minor upstream changes from AOSP

There is also a new rootfs available today which provides an updated library that is part of the 3D change mentioned above. Without an updated rootfs, you will not see the 3D improvements.

Those of you who read the commit logs for the rootfs releases will notice quite a few mentions of gingerbread in there. The new rootfs allows future XDAndroid gingerbread builds to boot. However, we have not yet released a gingerbread system image. Gingerbread is getting closer to a testing prerelease, but isn’t quite there yet.

Thanks for using XDAndroid! As usual, feel free to report bugs and watch development on the IRC channel or mailing list!

XDAndroid 2.2 Build FRX01

The XDAndroid Project is pleased to announce the first stable release of XDAndroid 2.2 (Android Froyo). This build is a significant milestone in the project. This is an important release of the system image component, which is just one piece of the bundles we release occasionally. Incremental releases of the other components will continue normally. Read on for a full, somewhat technical, list of important changes in this build.

Continue reading “XDAndroid 2.2 Build FRX01”

Froyo Progress Update

Another week, another Froyo update. Before I begin: if you’ve been building systems, we now have updated build documentation on the XDAndroid wiki for the froyo branch. Check it out!

Work on Froyo has continued to progress rapidly. The bugs are starting to dwindle and I’m beginning to work on features more and more.

GSM users will be happy to hear that I’ve finally integrated the Access Point Names (APNs) list correctly, and it will be installed with babijoee’s next system release. CDMA users shouldn’t feel left out either, since with the help of hamagc on IRC, I was also able to add the CDMA generic APN again. The vast majority of providers should have settings that work out of the box from now on.

Many users reported shortcomings in the on-screen keyboard. Touch sensitivity is still a bit off (and I don’t see that changing — these screens are pretty small), but I was able to pull some autocomplete dictionaries out of cyanogenmod’s source tree. The dictionaries make the keyboard much more useful, of course. This will also be in babijoee’s next build.

Finally, by popular demand I have re-enabled the touch-friendly incoming call screen. This screen is similar to the unlock screen when you turn the device back on: it offers two pull switches to answer or reject an incoming call. The touch-friendly screen displayed during an accepted (or dialed) call, however, is still disabled. The layout is buggy on VGA phones.

I’ve begun investigating the possibility of issuing over-the-air updates for XDAndroid systems. Building OTA update packages is easy, thanks to the Android build system. The difficult parts are integrating an update mechanism into our rootfs, and developing infrastructure for Android’s checkin service to contact and check for or receive updates. This would be a pretty neat feature down the road.

Thanks for reading!

Froyo Progress Update

It’s been a while since the last XDAndroid update. We’ve since released several testing builds of Froyo, all of which have been progressively more useful and stable.

Since babijoee’s beta-2 release, the primary focus of development has been on bugfixes. Many users have been running the builds and offering great feedback on what needs work. With their help, I’ve been able to make some major fixes in the system.

First off, lots of people reported that their phones weren’t getting data connections out of the box. Users had to enter their provider’s mobile access point (APN) information by hand. This is an unacceptable issue and something that I missed due to testing without a SIM card in my device. The XDAndroid-specific bits in the source tree actually had a very large list of APNs in it, but it wasn’t getting copied over during system installation. This was a bug in our build system support introduced in Froyo, which has been fixed.

Second, the Google Apps support was suboptimal. The Google Apps packages we relied on include libraries that were built for newer devices which use different CPUs. Since our devices were not entirely compatible with libraries built for those CPUs, the applications were crashing on startup. There has since been a Google Apps package developed specifically for Froyo and devices with older CPUs. This package has been integrated into our build system. Specifically, this has fixed the Voice Search application and voice input with the Android keyboard.

Finally, I continue to make tweaks to increase performance and responsiveness of the user interface. With cues from cyanogenmod, I’ve made a couple of animations speed-ups and gave a hint to the system to use less sophisticated eyecandy features where possible. This helps improve the user experience quite a bit. There are still other places which can benefit from further optimization, so keep an eye out for more small performance gains in the future.

These changes have been added to the source tree, but are not present yet in current releases (as of 14 July, this post’s date). Development’s pace has been increasing and we still have some bugs to squish, so keep an eye out for more test builds. For users who wish to attempt to build their own system images, I have updated the build documentation on the wiki for Froyo’s new procedures.

PS: We still have not fixed the SD card bug noted by many HTC Diamond users, but I’m starting to get some great information from helpful users on #xdandroid.