Will the Legend run Android 4.0? Maybe.

November 16th, 2011 2

My Android building machine features an

  • Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93GHz with
  • 8GB of RAM building to a
  • 1TB hard disk (RAID 1 array) running
  • Debian Unstable/Experimental.

I tried to compile 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from CM sources (but still rather vanilla) on my machine today.

Except for lib32ncurses5-dev that was missing here – don’t ask me why, maybe “apt-get autoremove” is to blame – and a quite unnecessary Java compiler check (OpenJDK is perfectly capable of building Android) I did not run into any problems at all.

I can’t tell you what this “You’ll need at least 128GB of RAM and a quadruple i7 Extreme setup” was all about but I can definitely say that my machine never used the swapfileduring the whole process. It did not even hit 6GB RAM. Maybe because I’m not using ccache?

The resulting file’s size is about 100 MB zipped, extracted about 140MB (only files going to /system). The system partition on my Legend (stock partition layout) is 240MB, so ICS should fit without problems, even after CM treatment.

$ time make -j8 otapackage
real   36m6.559s
user   196m32.677s
sys    10m19.084s

Also posted the above on G+.

Yes, you can haz Gingerbread!

April 11th, 2011 0

It’s done. Most users already knew about Gingerbread on their CM-supported devices so that’s not real news.

A kick in the nuts of every manufacturer that keeps its sources closed, releases of Android customized heavily and mouths shut about future updates. Even though so much has to be reverse engineered the CyanogenMod team was ultimately faster in bringing Gingerbread to our loved devices.

In your face, «insert manufacturer here»!

Can I haz Gingerbread, NAO?

December 27th, 2010 3

Excuse my infantile behaviour but this is simply nothing short of exciting and totally insane.

About a week ago I wasn’t even able to compile the Gingerbread branch of Android and today I’m using it on my Legend with only minor glitches. OK, they are not really minor but they don’t affect me that much.

There are still a few problems that definitely scream “FIXMEFIXMEFIXME”, like the .32 kernel HTC released a few weeks ago (which is a complete mess in every single way), but you can rest assured the gods in #teamdouche (cyanogen, arcee, zinx, …) will fix these problems eventually.

Yeah, this is so exciting.

Release candidates, anyone?

October 24th, 2010 3

Yes, you might already know: the CyanogenMod project is nearing release 6.1.

Looking at the changelog from 6.0 to 6.1 one has to say that teamdouche did an outstanding job. Officially supporting the Legend is only a very small part of it.

I’m actually quite proud that everything is working perfectly by now, no bugs or annoyances. CM nightly builds (from my own machine – that’s openness!) have been the main and only operating system on my Legend for three months now.

If I can get my hands on the Aria/Gratia 2.2 update and test the camera libraries then 6.1 will most likely ship with those (provided they work correctly) and I’ll try to port the kernel as well (once HTC releases it, which normally takes some time).

Exciting days to come…

Old News

September 29th, 2010 1

For some of you this might be rather old news but just to make sure it’s recorded in the eternal books of Google: I’ve become the official maintainer for the HTC Legend in the CyanogenMod project.

This basically means official support and official nightly builds. It also means that I have to get all my changes into CM or adapt them accordingly. This I’ve been doing for the last couple of days and only the correct support for non-rgb notification lights is missing (a rather big change).

It’s also nice that the new CMStats app seems to be enabled by some Legend users already. This will render my statistics in the android section of this site quite useless at some point.

Dark is the Night

September 7th, 2010 1

Now that Azure 1.0 has arrived people would certainly complain a lot if I released quite experimental builds based off the latest development in CyanogenMod. Even I wrote “experimental” a thousand times.

The consequence: a separate ROM. I’m pretty sure some will still not get the meaning of “nightly”, but I really can’t do anything about that.

Dark Azure (development thread here) will be the snapshot and development build with new features going there first.

All Blue

September 3rd, 2010 1

Finally done!

After some weeks of heavy development and testing I released Azure 1.0, codename for my port of the famous CyanogenMod 6.0.0 for the HTC Legend.

Bringing you Froyo faster than HTC with nearly all the features you might expect (except for FM radio of course) feels really amazing.

Baking Cakes

July 15th, 2010 0

I’ve been doing web-development for quite a long time now. But honestly it was never nearly half as much fun as when I discovered CakePHP a year ago.

It took me not even six hours to write the Android ROMs section, a task I would have spend at least a week on before I knew CakePHP.

By the way, the fancy graph is done using the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit (another great tool for web-developers).