Android

Hmm, so far operations with Andrea are moving fairly smoothly. Today, i spent a little time using Eclipse to try and prototype an idea, but soon gave up. Eclipse is a reasonable enough IDE but for Android work, the extra editors and crap are just not as useful as opening the file in the text editor, and if I may as well, then I will use VIM and execute the Android tools directly in a shell. Piss off.

I’ve been exploring the Android market more of late, because Andrea has so much more storage. My phone has limited internal storage so I rarely will use an app unless it offers something I find practical, like Dropbox & Opera. Rooting it helps since more stuff can be moved to the MicroSD card. Andrea on the other hand, has a lot more storage capacity: about 28GB user accessible from a market value of “32GB”. I’m still principally interested in apps that get work done. Two that I’ve been playing with today, are TextTab which is pretty much using your phones SMS from your tablet via Bluetooth.It’s awesome, it works, it does exactly what I want, and I can’t say the say about the Bluetooth SMS app that I tried during yesterdays shopping expideition. Something else that I tried, is a TeamSpeak 3 client. From the look of the write up, they likely intend to charge for it once it exits beta but it works as an OK client. Not enough for admin work or anything but fine for the core use: VoIP.

Alice has also been setup as a server, as part of cleaning my room. It will likely operate similar to the development server at work but for my personal projects, I’ve also exported some parts of my $HOME to the network. Eventually most of that will likely become stored on Andrea but for now I’m more interested in having it available. Andrea the tablet-book definitely brings my routine closer to the cloud than Alice the netbook but so far I am liking it.

Using a netbook as a mixture of development server and network attached storage may seem very weird. To me, it also has the added benifit that while I may lose my connection as the router goes offline – in a power outage, my session state in tmux can be saved for as long as the battery runs. Plus I could reattach locally  and have the same keyboard as the system I was working on. Muahuahauahuaa!!!!!!

After setting up my Eee Pad Transformer over night and lunch, I went about trying to root her after getting home from work. Flashing Andrea seemed to work fine, give or take that I normally have reservations about flashing stuff I haven’t personally proofed. It was marked as being appropriate for my SKU and release but left Andrea booting into a garbled multi-colour screen….a small fortune in paper weights.

I quickly rebooted Andrea into APX mode and searched Google for a way to unroot back to a stock ROM, even if that meant the original version. That soon lead me to Roach’s Prime v1.4 ROM, which I flashed to recover to a blank, usable, and rooted state. You can’t upgrade from Prime v1.4/Honeycomb 3.1 via ASUS updates, so I hit the web again to see if he had released a newer version of the ROM, sure enough, he has gotten up to v1.9! A quick look about showed me Prime v1.7/Honeycomb 3.2 stable and a 1.8 version in beta. So I tried to install the Prime v1.7 ROM as an update. Now that isn’t so hard, you basically save the ZIP archive and install it using ClockWorkMod via a recovery boot. The problemo is the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer sticks the internal storage at /mnt/sdcard with a link to /sdcard. Using a real memory card or USB device will go in /Removeable/WhatEver. So CWM couldn’t use the update, ‘cuz it couldn’t mount /sdcard.

Having missplaced my USB stick some time between work and vacation prep, I gave it no attempt to try that option and instead went looking for memory cards. I had purchased a pair of SD cards when I had bought a digitial camera a couple years ago, as it hadn’t lasted very long, my mother inherited them for her Dell Streak 7″. She had no idea where they went, so I checked her streak and found one – loaded the archive, stuck the card in the docks slot and bingo, same problem. So I removed the file, stuck that back in my mother’s tablet, and ripped the MicroSD card out of my phone. Sure enough that worked and in a few minutes was greated by a Honeycomb 3.2 versiion of Prime :-).

So now Andrea is alive, functional, and rooted. I just had to trade ASUS support for the brillance of Roach (that ROM saved my pad), and had to reinstall everything because I didn’t do a proper backup first. But that was a simple fix of redownload stuff off the Android Market via the website. I ain’t stupid, lol. When I get home, I will probably try to update to the v1.9 if it seems stable enough, but by the time I can get around to that, I will want to backup my stuff first.

After getting everything settled, I finally decided that it would be a good idea to register on xda-developers, since their forum is like most important place on the web for stuff like this. They have the most awesome forum registeration process ever, including a video. It’s worth it lol. Poking around the forums for my devices, it seems that it may be possible to flash a stock ROM after all but I would rather stick with Prime at this point. I’m also interested in seeing what gets cranked out but will need to aquire a suitable memory card before I can likely do much serious backing up.

I’m really thankful that Roach and cie made that available…lol