Building donut for dream – First attempt: a black screen

Yesterday I started downloading the source code from the donut branch again to see if it was possible to get it running on the HTC Dream (Android Dev Phone).

I build the source the same way as building cupcake but this time I used the defaults (like the prebuilt kernel and wlan.ko module) and did not change the htc_dream.mk build script.

The libcamera.so proprietary file is needed (and should be extracted from the official image) to make a sucessfull build (succesfull like that it builds). This is a difference with cupcake.

After flashing the phone, it shows the two boot logo’s and than a black screen. Looking at the debug information (shown inside logcat within Eclipse) you can see that there is an endless loop whereby android crash (the system_server) and is started over again (and crash… etc). Some of the errors are shown in this discussion (http://groups.google.com/group/android-platform/browse_thread/thread/929aa624d2da63a7).

So not a bootable donut version yet. For the record the steps I took

Initialize repo and get the source

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

Extract proprietary files (after source is downloaded)

cd ~/mydroid/vendor/htc/dream-open
./extractfiles.sh

You can also use the unyaffs method (described in this post http://www.johandekoning.nl/index.php/2009/06/07/building-android-15-getting-the-source/). But don’t forget to copy the libcamera.so from the lib folder

cp ~/htc/lib/libcamera.so ~/mydroid/vendor/htc/dream-open/proprietary/libcamera.so

Build source

Create a buildspec.mk file (inside the ~/mydroid directory) to define that a htc-dream build should be made. Because the prebuilt kernel is used, the file has the following contents:

TARGET_PRODUCT:=htc_dream

Save the file and start the make command from the mydroid directory

make

Flashing the phone

After build is finished flash the image files to your phone within fastboot (more details at http://www.johandekoning.nl/index.php/2009/07/03/building-android-1-5-flashing-the-phone/).

fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot flash userdata userdata.img

And reboot the device

fastboot reboot

Result

Now you will have a non bootable donut version I will try a second attempt whereby I use less proprietary files to see if it boots (this suggestion is made in the same discussion about building donut http://groups.google.com/group/android-platform/browse_thread/thread/929aa624d2da63a7)