The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

Android 101 – Part 2

Now that the emulator is up and running, you need to get familiar with adb - the Android Debug Bridge - and start poking around at your device.

I found ADB back in the latest SDK, and used it to connect to my emulator. You can start a shell and poke around. I want to get networking up on the emulator-- without connectivity this whole enterprise is pointless.

Find your device first:

$ adb devices
List of devices attached
emulator-5554	device

Start a shell:

$ ~/work/android-sdk-mac_x86-1.0_r1/tools/adb -s emulator-5554 shell
# ls
sqlite_stmt_journals
cache
sdcard
etc
system
sys
sbin
proc
init.rc
init.goldfish.rc
init
default.prop
data
root
dev
#

Reading Materials

I just ordered some Android books: Hello Android & Unlocking Android. They both have PDF versions available right now.

Starting Android Open Source Emulator

Once you have build Android on your Mac OSX (I have Leopard) following the Google directions, it's time to start it. This wasn't as easy as it sounds, as I couldn't find any docs that talked about this, except for this page that talks about the emulator in the SDK.

In your droid repo directory, this will start the emulator:

$ out/host/darwin-x86/bin/emulator -system out/target/product/generic -kernel prebuilt/android-arm/kernel/kernel-qemu

From there, you are back to working with it just like in the SDK.

Building Android – Available Now!

Android is OpenSourced, and you can build it yourself on MacOSX or an Ubuntu machine. THis is not the emulator, but real Android OS running on your system.

http://source.android.com/download

Has the directions.

Check out the known-issues page before giving up- there are some rough edges.

10/22 Update: watch out for your file system on the mac, you need to have one that is paritioned and formatted with case sensitivity, I just found out:

~/work/mydroid [558]$ make
build/core/product_config.mk:229: WARNING: adding test OTA key
build/core/main.mk:58: ************************************************************
build/core/main.mk:59: You are building on a case-insensitive filesystem.
build/core/main.mk:60: Please move your source tree to a case-sensitive filesystem.
build/core/main.mk:61: ************************************************************
build/core/main.mk:62: *** Case-insensitive filesystems not supported.  Stop.