ICS installed on Slate 500

[aaronb1138]

Little update for those interested. Tabletsx86.org seems to have pulled the build for now. I don't know who is running the site and they don't publish any contact information, so I'm not sure what is up over there. Disappointing since whoever did the build seems to know most of the tricks to get ICS running decent on a Slate.

I carved out 8 GB of my internal SSD for ICS and ran with it. Boot time is nice, around 10-12 seconds. Everything runs exceptionally smooth and fast. So what works / doesn't. Here's a list:

Resolution: Perfect 1024x600

Multitouch / Stylus: Works, multitouch works correctly and well. Stylus works as well. No support for the "Auto" mode from N-Trig just yet (switching between touch or stylus exclusively). Small potatoes. Also, no decent palm rejection currently. Makes the stylus a bit less effective.

Wifi: Perfect, solid connection.

Bluetooth: Works, not sure if it is 100%, was able to pair a Microsoft BT keyboard, but could never get it to work as a keyboard. Common issue in Android though for devices to be pair-able but unsupported by the OS.

Broken:

Hardware video acceleration: NONE. Current Intel EMGD drivers point at support for Android Gingerbread on E6xx but it would appear that no such drivers were rolled into this release. Keep in mind that Android uses a different frame buffer than X in Linux, so will need custom drivers to interface regardless.

Between no ARM NDK and lack of hardware accelerated video (OpenGL) 95% of market apps will not even show up available to install.

Sound: Not working correctly. Sounds like the Linux kernel has nearly the right drivers, but somewhere there is a PCI bus latency issue or some such causing the sound card buffers to get locked. Mostly loops the first half second of any given sound input. I had it working correctly once, but never since then.

SD Card automount also does not work. Same seems to go for USB storage. The Linux side might be auto-mounting, but I can't see any evidence the Android side sees it.

CPU does not throttle or sleep. You get 2-2.5 hours of Android on a full charge. It will keep your hands quite warm.

Sleep mode in Android is broken. Please disable sleeping the display, otherwise you will be rebooting your device once it hits the 10 minute idle mark.

Hardware keyboard... if you turn the OSK on as advised by Wolfpack, be advised there is no turning it back off. The menu item is not reachable in the current ROM.

Auto-rotate is also quite annoying. Apps not designed for landscape tablets kick to portrait automatically. Haven't found a manual toggle yet. Also, the accelerometer seems to get read sometimes by the Android OS, but is completely invisible to apps. Tested on "Abduction" to verify.

Be advised that Grub will need to be installed to dual boot. Also be advised that I have not been able to get at the Grub menu.lst file (not where it should be), so the default will be Android and you will need to use the volume keys to select which OS you wish to boot. "Home" button acts as enter. You will also run into needing to select the OS should your Slate reach hibernate mode. Luckily Windows does not care if Android was running before resuming from hibernation.

Unfortunately the developers of Android-x86 also don't include the tools and resources to recompile the kernel on the Android device. Haven't been able to get a clean sync with their repo... They mostly want you making completely clean builds on a dedicated Linux build box... bletch. I would much rather compile the kernel on the device and reboot, not re-image.

On the flip side, Google has released the latest Android SDK with hardware acceleration for the Android Emulator. Unfortunately, it is still quite slow and pokey to run. Not sure if the android-x86.org folks might be able to graft ARM v7 emulation into their branch from the emulator, but that is likely beyond their time commitment at current.

I might be working on a Honeycomb or ICS build using the Intel EMGD drivers here in the next couple months. If I get anything legitimate going, I will drop a new thread here. Despite the fact that both the Linux and Android communities have completely said f-ck off to Intel because of the driver woes they have had with the GMA500, I have no issue trying their binaries in a one-off ICS build for the Slate (until kernel hackers make something legit 3 years from now). Intel *claims* OpenGL 2.0 / ES 2.0 support under Android with Gingerbread on the E6xx (virtually identical graphics hardware).

Several people might be questioning the interest in Android since this device runs Windows 7 quite well. I would say that: A) Android apps are better optimized for touch input by miles. B) Windows 8 is probably going to drop us by the wayside since our native resolution is 1024x600. C) A proper CPU governor under Android can probably milk 7-8 hours of use out of the Slate 500. D) It's a minimal amount of space to give up to have the best of both worlds.

[jl_06]

I would love for someone to put some serious time into getting some android version working properly....i would even donate some cash to see this happen

[thacube]

Little update for those interested. Tabletsx86.org seems to have pulled the build for now. I don't know who is running the site and they don't publish any contact information, so I'm not sure what is up over there. Disappointing since whoever did the build seems to know most of the tricks to get ICS running decent on a Slate.

any way I can get that ISO from you?

[aaronb1138]

Here, I created a .torrent of the ISO image. I have *really* poor upload bandwidth, but it is only 160 MB. If others want it, please pull it in and seed.

I suspect they will be dropping an updated build pretty soon though.

http://tinyurl.com/bss3wd7

[thacube]

Thank you !

[aaronb1138]

Well, Intel has released the first x86 Android Smartphone. It bodes well for a variety of Android x86 based tablet devices or especially as I like to point out, the ability to have a dual-OS touch device with the widest array of applications and use cases.

The big news is Intel has written some form of well optimized ARM Native code translator in software. This would mean that many applications using the current ARM NDK are immediately portable to Android x86, assuming Intel goes and open sources the code or people are alright downloading a ripped copy of the kernel and libraries.

Here is the write-up at Anandtech AnandTech - Lava Xolo X900 Review - The First Intel Medfield Phone

This should also get app developers on board with cross compiling their apps for x86 native instruction as well. It would not be surprising to see OEMs like HP or Dell include a micro installation of Android x86 as a quick-boot multimedia OS on Windows 8 tablets as they come out. Similar to the laptops a few years ago which featured a separate (Linux) OS to quick boot and view DVD movies or play music.

[aaronb1138]

Some new developments for those interested in Android on the Slate. Some nice hackers have ripped the libhoudini and associated binaries used by the Intel Medfield Atom powered Xolo Lava x900 to do binary translation of ARM programs to x86. I have tried the ASUS ARMEABI v7a version at TABLETSX86.ORG with some success. No audio or touch on the HP Slate 500, since this build was for Asus netbooks. USB keyboard and mouse works fine. You can install regular Angry Birds and a LOT of mainstream ARM apps from the Google Play store. Angry Birds runs at about 1 FPS... we still need decent OpenGL Android drivers for the GMA 500. Nobody has quite got that together yet, and it will probably be the biggest challenge unless something can be ripped from either the Medfield devices or perhaps the Logitech Revue.

Right now I am just running Android x86 from the USB stick I put it on, no interest in taking up HDD space on my Slate until something more full featured comes out. Hopefully the Tabletsx86 guys will be updating the other builds soon with the libhoudini system soon. I'll try to update this thread the next that I hear on the matter.