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CyanogenMod 9 Working On the Nexus S
MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about progress toward getting an AOSP build working on the Nexus S. From the article: "Over the past week, ROM Manager extraordinaire Koush has been frantically working on making a working build of CyanogenMod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) for the Samsung Nexus S. The custom ROM, which is built purely from the Android Open Source Project, has now reached 'alpha 11.' All major features are present and no significant bugs remain. It's too early to say that the build is ready for prime time or mission-critical work — the final release of CM9 is due in the new year — but it's certainly stable enough for daily use. The most significant feature, if you can call it that, is that Koush's build of ICS is really very smooth — it's as nimble as Gingerbread, if not more so. Unlike the previous, non-CM build that was released last week, this alpha build of CM9 has every feature enabled, including Google Wallet, and setting a mobile data limit. As usual, the custom ROM is pre-rooted, has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware. "
I've read on Slashdot that Android isn't open source at all.
I want a real linux distro, not google's vision of how linux should be. Let me know when I can load Debian, SuSe, Fedora, etc, on my phone and then we'll talk.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
A project that releases source code under an open source license is an open source project.
Android, unlike many open source projects, isn't an open community development project, but while those two things often go together, they have no necessary relationship.
I have had to use ICBINB builds of Gingerbread for my Samsung Galaxy S 4G because CM7 was not available for that phone.... please please please support it for CM9!
Not sure if it's "real" enough for you, but Ubuntu is coming to tablets.
Whether that means you'll be able to run any Linux application you like remains to be seen, but I imagine if it's Debian-based it should be quite hackable.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Cyanogen still doesn't have a functional camera for the Captivate
When's it going to work on the droid 3? :(
You mean when is it going to work on the Droid 1 right? You kids and your Droid 3's. Back in my day we had 550 mhz and 256 MB RAM and had to use it on the way to school in a blizzard, uphill both ways. Still rocking the Droid 1 with CM7, although this little puppy is getting slooooowww...
ice cream sandwich, gingerbread, honeycomb? smooth? "there are no bugs, but its not ready for mission critical work. only for daily use".
i feel like i am watching some late-era British movie, the sounds are familiar, but they don't appear to form any sort of meaningful, coherent thought.
I recently left the n900 world for an Android phone - my first - the Samsung Captivate Glide (SGH-I927).
I expected to root it easily; I hadn't realized how hostile manufacturers are becoming towards their customers. Indeed, as I write this, I still haven't succeeded. It actually feels like I may be the only person in the world who bought this device, which, to me, is utterly confounding.
What happened to qwerty phones? Why did they fall so far in popularity? I find it excruciating to surrender half my screen real estate to an on-screen keyboard.
This Nexus S looks great, and is easy to root and flash, which is nice. But, without a keyboard? To me.. useless. Come on Google! Put some weight behind a qwerty model of this!
And for the love of god, start playing hardball with manufacturers that lock their bootloaders and fail to provide a clean method of rooting! Simply deny them access to the Google utilities.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Sweetness. Guess I haven't been over on Cyanogenmod for a little too long as I didn't realize Koush was this close. I just happen to have a Nexus S and am a Cyanogen Advocate. I've been running Cyan Roms since about ver3 on my G1 way back and have found that if bugs appear, it usually gets fixed or a workaround is posted fairly quickly. I can actually say I trust most of the Cyanogen stuff to not brick my devices but I do reserve that I have a little experience with this type of thing. Can't wait to go get me an Ice Cream Sandwich !
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Something about seeing the phrases "pre-rooted" and "Google Wallet" in the same sentence scares me.
It exists. Motorola Droid3 -> http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/DROID-3-by-MOTOROLA-US-EN
The keyboard is amazing. The phone is awesome (even the actual phone part, as in I can hear the other person and the other person can hear me). Dual core processor, very nice screen.
One click rooted, removed motorola/verizon crap, can't be happier.
Are there any LTE-enabled phones which support Cyanogenmod?
I bought one: it was a wonderful device (except for the touchscreen being resistive), but what killed it for us was that it had critical parts of the GUI being non-open.
We would have deployed 200 of them, but we needed one minor bugfix: the ability to operate the camera during a voip phone call (which meant being able to disable the shutter sound so as to allow the sound-card not to block). Sadly, the camera library was crippled: it's very, very easy to use Hildon (basically GTK) to access the image capture with gstreamer, but we only if we didn't use the proprietary feature called "auto-focus"! So we couldn't fix it ourselves, and when we reported the bug, the Nokia team confirmed it, but didn't actually get round to fixing it (at least, not within many weeks).
It's a real shame too: I could SSH into the phone, launch X-applications (on either $DISPLAY), install applications with a real package manager, and enjoy all the other Linux goodness.
It's the RAM. Overclock that CPU to 800 or 1000MHz and it flies, but the 256MB of RAM is a huge bottleneck. I'm currently running a Desire which is an order of magnitude faster in daily use (used to have a Milestone) because it has 512MB of RAM, but even that's still a pretty big bottleneck. Here's to hoping that the standard 1GB on current models will be enough to keep Android running smoothly for the next two years or so...
I wonder when the first Android devices with upgradeable RAM will start to appear ;)
It doesn't need to appeal to middle-aged paunch. It needs to appeal to hungry, young exploration.
People once ridiculed us for wanting a Unix-like environment on the PC, instead of using a "real" computer (either some over-priced Unix workstation or a PC with MS Windows, depending on who was doing the ridiculing). We burned the midnight oil, brought it into the workforce, and now variations of Linux-based PCs are the main form of real computer used in most datacenters and even many supercomputers. Back then, we needed affordable, personal hardware to support our studies and hacking. More recently, SOHO routers like the Linksys WRT54G seemed like an amazingly cheap platform for hacking, but they lacked the crucial human-computer interface devices to support independent learning... you still need PC equipment and skills to work with these headless devices.
Today, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones are the most comparable platform to our old PCs, affordable and personal, with clear commodity growth trajectories and a viable human-computer interface (plus desktop-oriented options with HDMI and bluetooth). My cheap PC in college ran Linux, including X Windows, Emacs, GCC, and other development-related tools, sufficient to do programming lessons and to use as a terminal to the great information resources on the 90s Internet (USENET, gopher, email lists, and eventually NCSA Mosaic). A modern smartphone with 1+ GHz multi-core ARM CPU, 512+ MB RAM, and many GB of flash is more than adequate to support programming studies and to act as a terminal to the modern Internet's information resources. And the used device market should allow hackers to have multiple such devices without blowing their budget.
Perhaps we owe it to the next generation to break this platform wide open and give them the tools to learn and to make something great, much as an older generation was laying the foundation for our Linux PCs when we were still too green to actually pull it all off ourselves.
Come on, ROM Manager IS bloatware, advertising its paid version. Completely useless as one could point to flashable image when in recovery mode.
Roald Dahl wasn't above pun-ishing his readers on occasion.
Plan My Week for iPhone
Android is GPL. You can't change the license on the Linux kernel without permission, and it has never been released under any other license. There is lots of cruft layered on top of the OS that has other licensing, but the OS is GPLed.
Google has released source code for every version of Android that they've shipped, to the people that they shipped to (typically vendors, not users) as required by the GPL. Google is not required to post sources on slashdot, as some people seem to think, and Google is not required to give you source code for devices somebody other than Google distributed.