bobpeers -> blog

It’s all over the news but I’m happy to see that Microsoft have lifted the artificial 3 application limit on Windows 7 Started Edition. As much as this would have made life easier for Linux to compete it’s also ironic that to some extent the threat from Linux has forced this decision.

If there was no completion in the OS market do you really think that Microsoft would have done the same?

On the other hand they are still severely limiting the capability of the Starter Edition, to quote from the Windows Blog it DOES NOT include the following

• Aero Glass, meaning you can only use the “Windows Basic” or other opaque themes. It also means you do not get Taskbar Previews or Aero Peek.
• Personalization features for changing desktop backgrounds, window colors, or sound schemes.
• The ability to switch between users without having to log off.
• Multi-monitor support.
• DVD playback.
• Windows Media Center for watching recorded TV or other media.
• Remote Media Streaming for streaming your music, videos, and recorded TV from your home computer.
• Domain support for business customers.
• XP Mode for those that want the ability to run older Windows XP programs on Windows 7.

I’m pretty sure that with Googles Android and Intels Moblin under heavy development, with some big players behind them, there’s still room for competition in the netbook OS market.

It’s been pretty up and down but I’ve successfully compiled Google Andriod for an eee701. The problem is that after converting the installer.img into a VDI file and booting in Virtualbox I’m stuck at the boot menu.

I’ve actually been compiling the source in a Virtual environment, a Fedora 10 virtual machine running on Windows XP Professional.

In brief here’s the procedure so far on Fedora 10.

1. Install the Sun Java SE Development Kit (JDK)
2. Edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the following lines.

   export JAVA_HOME='/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_12'
   PATH=.:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin:$PATH
   

3. Install gperf.

   # yum install gperf

4. Make sure you have a ~/bin directory in your home directory, and check to be sure that this bin directory is in your path:

   $ cd ~
   $ mkdir bin
   $ echo $PATH
   

5. Download the repo script and make sure it is executable:

   $ curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
   $ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
   

6. Create an empty directory to hold your working files:

   $ mkdir mydroid
   $ cd mydroid
   

7. Get the cupcake branch

   $ repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b cupcake

8. To pull down files to your working directory from the repositories as specified in the default manifest, run

   $ repo sync

9. I tried compiling with

   $ TARGET_ARCH=x86 TARGET_PRODUCT=eee_701 DISABLE_DEXPREOPT=true make -j2 installer.img

   but this fails with the error:

   du: cannot access `out/target/product/eee_701/data': No such file or directory
   

   After making this data directory and running again the compiling is successful.

   File edit complete. Wrote 2 images.
   Done with bootable installer image -[ out/target/product/eee_701/installer.img ]
   

10. Change to the output directory

    $ cd out/target/product/eee_701/

11. Convert the installer.img to a Virtualbox VDI file

    $ VBoxManage  convertfromraw -static -format VDI ./installer.img  ./installer.vdi

12. Create a new virtual machine in Virtualbox and use this vdi as the hard drive.
13. Unfortunately this is where I get stuck. At first I received errors like:

    $  Booting `recovery`
    cmdline (hd0,1)/cmdline
    Error 15: File not found
    

    or

    Booting `std_boot`
    cmdline (hd0,2)/cmdline
    Error 22: No such partition
    

    Exactly as described here
    These problems were fixed by changing hd(0,2) to hd(0,0) but then it seems to boot only to be presented with this error. The same can be found in this post.

    init: Unable to open persistent property directory /data/property errno: 2
    sh: can’t access tty: Waiting for device /dev/block/sdb2
    

I can’t get past this error and the solutions on android-porting pages are sometimes hard to follow. Never the less I’ll keep trying especially that I’m so close.

Note that this was using the stock Andriod kernel. I also tried compiling the 2.6.27 kernel but it fails with the following error.

drivers/rtc/alarm.c:16:27: error: asm/mach/time.h: No such file or directory
drivers/rtc/alarm.c: In function ‘alarm_suspend’:
drivers/rtc/alarm.c:357: error: implicit declaration of function ‘save_time_delta’
make[2]: *** [drivers/rtc/alarm.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [drivers/rtc] Error 2
make: *** [drivers] Error 2

Reading this post I see that this is a known issue and there is a patch but I haven’t tried applying the patch yet.

If you do decide to compile your own kernel it’s pretty easy.

$ cd ~/mydroid/vendor/asus/eee_701/
$ make menuconfig

Save the config file then.

$ make bzImage

Then copy the kernel to vendor/asus/eee_701

$ cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage ../vendor/asus/eee_701/kernel

After reading this page about running Google Android in Virtualbox I thought it might be fun to have a go.

Just download the vdi file from the above site and create a new virtual machine. On booting I selected a video mode of 640x480x16 (use letter g) for best results. Note that you also have to enable the Serial Ports in Virtualbox otherwise it hangs at the grub menu. Apart from that it boots in a matter of seconds and looks really good.

Note that there’s no networking or mouse support right now but it’s still fun to play around with. Many thanks to the above site for sharing the vdi file for anyone to try.

I don’t run any anti-virus software on my laptop, for one I run Linux but the main reason is that I’m careful what I do. I open all my emails in plain text, don’t run file sharing software and so on. Of course it’s currently true that in-the-wild viruses on Linux are almost unheard.

It’s long been argued by opponents of Linux that the lack of Linux viruses is only because virus writers target the largest user base, meaning Windows, not because Linux in inherently more secure. But I wonder with mobile phones becoming more powerful, Linux being relatively bigger in the mobile phone space and the reports that in future virus writers will target phones if this will be put to the test.

Google recently released the source code for their Linux based Android platform and they obviously hope that by creating an open framework they will appeal to many manufacturers and grab a slice of the market. If virus writers start to target Android then maybe the argument regarding Linux security can be laid to rest one way or the other.