I finally got my [Cupcake to build]{baking-cupcake}. The next step is to try to build something far tastier… naturally that something has to be the Cyanogen Cupcake/Donut blend.

Grab a coffee, sit back, and read on to find out how to build your own CyanogenMod Android ROM from Cyanogen’s Git repositories…

I’ve previously written about [how to root an android phone]{rooting-g1}, and mentioned that there was a better way which I had not tried yet. Well, I did try it today.

The procedure written by Zinx from ZenThought exploits a recently found bug in the Linux kernel (see CVE-2009-2692).

We were hanging out by the pool on my daughter’s birthday. I thought I would be an ever-so-funny-guy and push my wife into the pool. She thought she would be equally funny and pull me in with her. So far so good, all fun and games.

As soon as I landed in the water, and remembered that I had my [G1]{tag/g1} in my pocket, I instantly felt 100% less funny.

This story has a good ending, as I was able to get the phone back into perfectly working condition…

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!

I now [have]{into-android} a [sim-unlocked]{sim-unlocking-g1} [rooted]{rooting-g1} T-mobile G1 phone running Android. I’ve installed the Cyanogen v3.6.8.1 firmware on it, and upgraded the recovery image to Cyanogen’s pimped out version.

I am really impressed with the cell phone and MID aspects of the device. But I bought it so I could do some hacking.

All right… so what else can I do with this thing? It sounds logical that I now write a Hello world application.

One of the phones I picked up on eBay was SIM-locked (see my [previous post]{into-android}) and I had to go through the process of unlocking it so I could use it on my local cell network.

WARNING: It worked for me, but it may not for you. This may very well brick your phone! In some cases you will only have 3 chances (in others 10) to unlock, failing to do so can damage your SIM card or the phone.

Still here? Let’s get started…

In my continued quest to learn more and start hacking on the Android phones, I’ve recently rooted my Android based HTC Dream (aka Tmobile G1) phones.

I’ll start by explain the terminology. There are two ways in which the phones can be unlocked:

• so called rooting, which I describe in this post, involves replacing the bootloader so that the phone can use community generated firmware images, aka ROM’s.

• there is also unjailing or unlocking the phone so that it can be used with any SIM card on any GSM network; and I’ll talk about that in due time.

I am a late comer to the Android craze. I got to play with one recently at the Linux Symposium in Montreal, and I decided I have to get one. I ended up picking up a pair from ebay – one to hack on, and one to carry in my pocket.

I’d like to work on the core platform and not so much the apps.

Anyway, my storey is boring so far.

Below are the interesting links I found so far while researching the platform.