Today I wanted to see if I could build a bootable image for my Tmobile G1.

This post has been updated a few times. I had a hard time building the master branch. The cupcake branch built, but failed to run. Next I tried android-sdk-1.5_r3, this seems to boot but the phone is not really functional. Next attempt was to build cupcake and not change the kernel. Duh!

Standard WARNING: It worked for me, but it may not for you. This may very well brick your phone!

Setup…⌗

  • modern Linux distro (Debian/testing here)
  • standard build tools (gcc, make, etc)
  • Java6 JDK
  • Android SDK
  • the repo utility in your path (download repo)
  • 5G of disk space

Primitive build…⌗

Next let’s create a new repository to work in…

# mkdir mydroid
# cd mydroid
# repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b cupcake

At this point you’ll be prompted to tell the build system about yourself. If you’re already a git user, it will read the defaults from your git configuration (I think that’s where it got it from).

At this point only some meta data was downloaded. You don’t have any source code yet, so run…

# repo sync

… to fetch all the sources from the kernel.org Android mirror site. This could take a long time as it downloads about 1 gigabyte into the .repo directory… took about 30 min here.

As an aside, switching repo branches is done (to the best of my knowledge) by rerunning the init command with a different -b option and then running sync to update the tree. I may have this all wrong since it takes just as long to do the sync as it did the first time :(

Now getting back to building, when sync is finished fetching things, you can continue with:

# make

… this takes about an hour on my box. It might work with make -j10 but I have not tried.

Now building it for real…⌗

As before I start with a clean image…

# mkdir mydroid
# cd mydroid
# repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b cupcake
# repo sync

You should be able to just clean the existing image you have instead.

Here are the contents of my local_manifest.xml file…

# cat > .repo/local_manifest.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest>
    <!--
         <remove-project name="kernel/common"/>
         <project path="kernel"                name="kernel/msm"                     revision="refs/heads/android-msm-2.6.29" />
         <project path="vendor/htc/dream-open" name="platform/vendor/htc/dream-open" revision="refs/heads/cupcake"            />
         <project path="hardware/msm7k"        name="platform/hardware/msm7k"        revision="refs/heads/cupcake"            />
    -->
    <project path="kernel"                name="kernel/msm"                     revision="refs/heads/android-msm-2.6.27" />
</manifest>

Then sync up again

# repo sync

While that’s happening, you need to connect your rooted phone running some community firmware (liky CyanogenMod), and start the Android Debug Bridge:

# sudo adb start-server

Next copy all the proprietary bits out of the image:

# cd vendor/htc/dream-open
# ./extract-files.sh
# cd -

Next setup the environemtn variables:

# source build/envsetup.sh

Followisg that, change the build to build for the HTC Dream:

# lunch htc_dream-eng

Now were are ready to build

# make -j10

(rejoice, it completed in 13 minutes)

Running the image…⌗

WARNING: It worked for me, but it may not for you. This may very well brick your phone!

Finally, you get to program it into the phone:

# cd out/target/product/dream-open
# fastboot flash system system.img
# fastboot flash boot boot.img
# fastboot flash userdata userdata.img
# fastboot reboot
# cd -

OMG! it boots! but nothing really works.

Disclaimer…⌗

Apologies, this post is a work in progress. I hope to get more details in here, but for now you can reed the fine links I’ve provided below.

Resources…⌗