Appril, a pup for Android developers

[linuxcbon]

hi Barry,
- are you aware of the bug of xorg.conf needing AutoAddDevices set to false.
- what did you set in sysinit for sound hardware, to avoid "sound hdaudioC1D0: HDMI ATI/AMD: no speaker allocation for ELD" ?
- I don't think it's a good idea to have /var as a symlink. I prefer to have it as a normal folder and mounted as tmpfs.
cheers

[futwerk]

Thanks, BarryK, here are a few more.

[Rattlehead]

Hey guys, could someone at least throw me a one-liner on what is the initrd.q file and where to find it? Once I had that, I think I could solve the rest of my doubts on my own. Thank you.

[L18L]

Hey guys, could someone at least throw me a one-liner on what is the initrd.q file and where to find it? Once I had that, I think I could solve the rest of my doubts on my own. Thank you.

No one-liner but one picture from april64 not appril.
Hope you will get better answers.

[Rattlehead]

Hey L18L, thank you for the screenshot. They say an image is worth a thousand words, so that's a lot of one liners there!

I'll download April64 as soon as I find it (the Ibiblio link is down, and the only other link I've found is via Pirate Bay, which gets blocked in the library where I usually get my Internet access).

Anyways, once I get the distro the process seems straightforward: mount the iso, get the initrd.q file and put it where Appril's installer script can find it, and good to go, so thank you!

[gcmartin]

@Rattlehead, et al. The requirement for a 64bit distro has been brought to @BarryK's attention. Developers in the world who would do Android anything would have a PC that is minimally as old as Android itself. That would be a PC acquired in the last decade. ALL new PCs built since 2005 were built with the 64bit manufacturing spec. That spec is 64bit.

The primary element in a developer's system is RAM. In Android development, this is especially needed for both its visualizations and for running the Android emulator.

I am sure @BarryK is aware and I am sure he will respond with a system that will match better what Android developers need.

Looking forward, as well.

[disciple]

Hi Barry, this isn't about Appril, but since you still have a no comments blog, hopefully you're still monitoring this thread.
You're working on a Quirky with 64bit kernel and 32bit userspace. My questions are:
1) have you thought about providing both 64bit and 32bit kernel, so it still supports old hardware?
2) Are you talking about a "true" 64bit kernel + 32 bit userspace, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI?

[BarryK]

Hi Barry, this isn't about Appril, but since you still have a no comments blog, hopefully you're still monitoring this thread.
You're working on a Quirky with 64bit kernel and 32bit userspace. My questions are:
1) have you thought about providing both 64bit and 32bit kernel, so it still supports old hardware?
2) Are you talking about a "true" 64bit kernel + 32 bit userspace, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI?

disciple,
Thanks for that link, it has the info I was wondering about -- the x32-abi was introduced with the 3.4 kernel.

I have posted that link and more to my blog:
http://bkhome.org/news/?viewDetailed=00252

The speed of what I have dubbed "neo-64" is the most facinating thing, something that I had not realised until now.

I am looking to consolidate Quirky, reduce the builds that I have to upload, so I am probably going to stop building with a 32-bit kernel -- but that is still a maybe.

So, yes, 64-bit kernel, with the "x32-abi" option enabled, so it runs 32-bit applications in the 64-bit address-space and effectively doubles the number of registers available.

Each application will see only 4GB, but 4GB for one app is pretty phenomenal. So if you have a PC with 12GB RAM, say, you could have the situation where individual apps have an entire 4GB completely to themselves.

[amigo]

Does anyone know where the android-studio files are located in the filesystem in Appril? And how to invoke the program?

[L18L]

Does anyone know where the android-studio files are located in the filesystem in Appril? And how to invoke the program?

There is an icon on the desktop
labelled AStudio
launching /usr/sbin/astudio

#!/bin/sh

#150815 setup emulator...
#appinventor.sh also calls this.
if [ ! -d /root/.android/avd/aiavd.avd ];then
#do this in another script...
/usr/local/android_build/ai-emulator-setup AStudio
fi

/opt/android/android-studio/bin/studio.sh

#if used the emulator, it is still running afterward...
sleep 2
kill 99999999 `pidof emulator emulator64-arm emulator64-mips emulator64-x86 emulator-arm emulator-mips emulator-x86` 2>/dev/null
#150816 emulator does not work properly if start ai2 2nd time, have to kill these...
killall aiStarter
killall java

[gcmartin]

If the recent post are resulting from Google most recent updates to Android development which SIGNIFICANTLY improves emulation testing speeds, we may have to wait for that to land in the Appril series. This distro, would also benefit from a 64bit build as many developers (especially the young ones) have 64bit PCs with loads of RAM which is useful for any developer-user with lots of subsystems active.

And, for future, touch would also bring benefit in testing Android emulation behavior. This not absolutely essential but I think everyone understands it usefulness as we are developing/testing for real Android devices. This feature is still missing in the Quirky series of distros with little to no directions to implement.