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[Q] Android noob, Generic device, A few questions?

First let me introduce myself. The name is Darcy and I have been casually using linux and other *nix OS for about a decade. I am in school working on a programing degree ATM, and am a pretty quick study. Anyways, I without much research bought my wife a generic 7" tablet running android 1.6. I know what processor it has and Im hoping that leads me to a place to start. Ok so the device is a "Kasser Net'sGo" we didnt realize that its just a china pad with another companys name on it when we ordered it. So most of the apps dont run correctly, and in general the device sucks(on a software level the HW is fine although generic).
Anyways it apears that i can get into recovery mode to flash if i had no other choices. But since there are no official roms im hoping to find a build thats based on the same CPU or similar hardware to find a starting point. Its running the Marvell Aspen 800mhz chip and standard ddr2. Sadly thats all we have been able to find out about this device.
I have compiled custom builds for linux before, and i have now purchased a Gtab so i have a less garbage device to test some things on(i have allready flashed 2 different roms and fooled with a bunch of the settings). But we would realy like to do something with this other tablet. So if anyone can point me in the direction of some info on how to do android builds or a repository of chipset drivers and such that might help me that would be greatly appreciated.

[Q] Dual booting Ubuntu 11.04 and Android 3.0?

The dual-form nature of this item would fit a dual-boot scenario perfectly. Boot into Android when used as a tablet, boot into Ubuntu when docked. Just curious as to the possibility of this.
As far as I know, Ubuntu supports ARM architecture, so the Tegra 2 chip should work well with it. Ubuntu 11.04 was just released with the integrated Unity interface, which looks wonderful with the touchscreen: http://unity.ubuntu.com/projects/utouch/
The Unity 2D interface should fly on the Tegra 2, even if the Unity 3D mode lags.
Now I know that on the Xoom, we were able to run Ubuntu on a VNC server and connect to it locally, but that is obviously not an ideal solution, due to VNC's weakness, and the general inefficiency of it.
Are there any devs working on something like this so far? I am sure there would be a very sizable audience for something like this. I'd be happy to do any necessary testing, and I'm sure more will as well. I also wouldn't mind taking this as an opportunity to get involved with the dev community (I have a thorough background in CS, just no experience with this specifically), I'd be happy if anyone were to take me under their wing. =)

You're not the only one hoping for this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1053641

I was just thinking about this yesterday. Dual booting Ubuntu and Android would make this the perfect device for me.

i would also love the ability to run linux on mine

I'm tempted to wait until this is guaranteed to happen before buying this thing. I need a new portable device for developing on the go, and I also want and need a Honeycomb device for testing apps and casual content consumption.
At the same time though, if anyone knows of a site or thread dedicated to making this dual-boot happen (similar to the dedicated Toshiba AC100 page here http://tosh-ac100.wetpaint.com/page/Ubuntu ), I wouldn't mind learning all about it and potentially help if I can, so please share.
Sent from my Milestone using XDA App

There are some devs who definitely pulled this off on the Atrix and I had Ubuntu on my phone so I'm sure we can get it on the transformer. I'll try to find them and see if similar methods can be used.

It'll take years but I don't see why it wouldn't work. If I can do this on my old ass wm6.5 phone then it's possible on the TF!

Maybe it wont take years, but more of these tablets have to hit the market. Still so many people waiting on their preorders, me included.
I think that there might be quite the interest in making this happen. I remember reading somewhere that Ubuntu allready runs on the Tegra2, so why should it be far into the future before we see it running on the Transformer?
Sorry for any typos. I have fat fingers, a 4" screen, a small child and a dictionary gone wild...

here's to hoping
So far i'm quite impressed with this little tablet. It crunches bytes as fast as i can throw them, and customizing it was easy enough. Although with the dock station and Tegra 2 it does feel more like a netbook than a tablet.
Android 3.0 IMO is the best compromise between a desktop and mobile phone OS. Although it's expandability is not quite what i would wish it to be. Possibly once more developers gear their programs for the higher resolutions and more powerful CPUs this will change. For now dual booting Ubuntu and Android would be perfect.
I'm on board with any project coming about to make this happen, and would offer up my hardware and feedback for beta testing. Hope to see a dedication in this direction soon!

Has anyone tried the method in the xoom development forums?
Sent from HTC Inspire 4G via XDA Premium.

gordec said:
Has anyone tried the method in the xoom development forums?
Sent from HTC Inspire 4G via XDA Premium.
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I haven't seen the post, but I'm assuming you mean VNC?

Zach Alt said:
I haven't seen the post, but I'm assuming you mean VNC?
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Yeah, it's VNC. That's not that hard, we're talking about straight booting INTO Ubuntu.

i have this image from my desire, which boots linux xlde (or something) i cant get it to connect to that image. Pockecloud just get Server disconnected.... maybe another image.. actually that was loading it from removable MicroSD, im now going to try copying to the internal memory "SDCARD" as that would be what the script would have orignally been setup for. I will post results as soon as this has finished pasting the files...
EDIT: still cant get this to work, seems like terminal is ending too quickly which i think means the loopback memory doesnt work, i think thats how it works anyway.
No lock with WYSE pocket cloud or android vnc, i think we need another build for honeycomb, well not so much the OS but the Tegra chip instead.

ubuntuforums.org
There is a thread over at ubuntuforums.org regarding this matter, though they have a different take on it.
One of the posts state:
Re: Asus Eee Pad Transformer
I plan to get one (not available in my region yet, plus I hear there'll be a 3G version next quarter) and install Ubuntu on it, albeit with KDE/Gnome instead of Unity.
There's not technical reason it can't run Ubuntu, it's just a matter of getting the boot loader working. The instructions seem simple enough, although dual booting with Android might be a little more challenging.
If anyone does get one and install Ubuntu on it, please let us know how it goes.
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Maybe it's not all that farfetched getting Ubuntu to run on this device, or any other Tegra2 base tablet.
The original thread can be found at:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1741103&highlight=eee+pad+transformer&page=1

looks like dual booting may be fairly difficult; I wouldn't mind soloing ubuntu touch os on mine...

I think dual booting may be difficult, but I think chain booting (right terminology?) from Android first and then into Ubuntu would probably be possible.

I don't think many people understand how hard it will be to create a bootable version of Ubuntu. VNCing is easy for the most part.

Would it be possible to use the motorola xoom guide to get ubuntu running with vnc on the eee transformer?
Sorry for any typos. I have fat fingers, a 4" screen, a small child and a dictionary gone wild...

Is the VNC version that bad? Is it very slow or the picture is not full color? I'd like to use it maybe for Open Office (or something lighter) and some programming in text editor.

Looks like there has been significant progress on this. backtrack has been released for arm.. its a security-centric distro, but its built on an ubuntu base.
I'm downloading the img now.. dont know about dual boot though. guess someone needs to port grub over first =)
I cant post links....but a search for 'backtrack5 xoom' should get you there.

Windows Phone 7 Rom on Android Tablet

Tried to search for this but couldnt find anything is it possible to get a mango ROM working on an android tablet?
There are loads of 7" Android tablets out there for under £60 not the biggest fan of android but would like a cheap tablet for quick browsing of web and showing photos to friends etc.
Would be cool if could get a mango ROM flashed onto one of those 7" tabs

That's a good question. I'd also be interested if it were possible to drop Mango onto a tablet that started out life as an Android. It'd have to be a 7" screen, and it'd have to have a capacitive screen

jasongw said:
That's a good question. I'd also be interested if it were possible to drop Mango onto a tablet that started out life as an Android. It'd have to be a 7" screen, and it'd have to have a capacitive screen
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Why does it have to be 7"? Resolution?

mcorrie1121 said:
Why does it have to be 7"? Resolution?
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I think we're pretty much locked to 800x480 resolution, which I suspect would look horrible on a 10" tablet

Yea but im sure if it possible to port people will figure out a way around that like a regist edit or something. Actully maybe on a bigger screen more tiles would be visible instead of only 8 tiles or 6 it would be like 12 or 14

That is an interesting question. I was wondering the same thing, which is how I found this thread...

First of all, it would have to be a tablet with a WP7-compatible CPU. Unlike most x86 chips used in PCs, different ARM chips may have incompatible kernel-mode interfaces, so the core of every OS must be built for that chip. Linux (and therefore Android) can be built to run on pretty much any ARM chip. In theory, the same is true of Windows CE (the kernel that WP7 is built on), but without kernel sources (and no, the CE6 and CE7 sources available from MS aren't quite the same) we can't build custom kernels like that.
Second, and much harder, would be finding the drivers for the hardware. Every single WP7 device comes with a bunch of OEM code, the "firmware", that interfaces the kernel to the hardware. This is different from device to device (thus why, if you do something like flash a Samsung Omnia 7 ROM to a Samsung Focus, or even a Focus r3 ROM to a Focus r4, the phone won't work correctly afterward). Android has something similar, but again it has two benefits: the kernel is open-source, and there are Linux drivers for almost every piece of computing hardware (although not always very good ones). For WP7, porting to a new device is very hard because of this. The HD2 worked because
A) it originally ran a CE-based OS (an older one, but still CE based)
B) it's very similar in hardware to the HD7 (not enough to run HD7 ROMs, but enough to pull some drivers from HD7 ROMs)
C) an early firmware for the WP7 kernel was developed for it and leaked.
None of those things are going to be true for the typical random Android tablet.

GoodDayToDie said:
First of all, it would have to be a tablet with a WP7-compatible CPU. Unlike most x86 chips used in PCs, different ARM chips may have incompatible kernel-mode interfaces, so the core of every OS must be built for that chip. Linux (and therefore Android) can be built to run on pretty much any ARM chip. In theory, the same is true of Windows CE (the kernel that WP7 is built on), but without kernel sources (and no, the CE6 and CE7 sources available from MS aren't quite the same) we can't build custom kernels like that.
Second, and much harder, would be finding the drivers for the hardware. Every single WP7 device comes with a bunch of OEM code, the "firmware", that interfaces the kernel to the hardware. This is different from device to device (thus why, if you do something like flash a Samsung Omnia 7 ROM to a Samsung Focus, or even a Focus r3 ROM to a Focus r4, the phone won't work correctly afterward). Android has something similar, but again it has two benefits: the kernel is open-source, and there are Linux drivers for almost every piece of computing hardware (although not always very good ones). For WP7, porting to a new device is very hard because of this. The HD2 worked because
A) it originally ran a CE-based OS (an older one, but still CE based)
B) it's very similar in hardware to the HD7 (not enough to run HD7 ROMs, but enough to pull some drivers from HD7 ROMs)
C) an early firmware for the WP7 kernel was developed for it and leaked.
None of those things are going to be true for the typical random Android tablet.
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So, long story short, probably not gonna happen. Gotcha. At least I know some of the work that is takes, for I am sure that it will take much more work.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF300T using xda app-developers app

yea your not gonna get arm wp7 on an android tablet , however there are many simulations of wp7 in android tablets , so if you want wp7 on an android yes thats the way to do it , but why?

[Completed] Is it possible to root a WM8880/GA-1311F-based laptop?

Hello, I'm really new to Android devices. In fact, this is my first Android-based device ever. But I do have a lot of experience with Linux and Windows, and it's weird how locked down ARM-based hardware actually is. Android isn't as bad as Apple, but it's still a lot less freedom than I'm used to having. I'm getting the impression that installing custom ROM would be almost as much of a pain as installing the Homebrew Channel on a Wii.
Anyway, one thing that I should point out about my device is that it has no touchscreen at all. It has a touchpad and a keyboard in a laptop form factor, but it runs Android. It has SD card slots, USB ports, and an Ethernet port. It's a netbook with smartphone hardware. I'm curious what I can do with it, and I wouldn't be losing much if I bricked it.
If it were possible, I'd be interested in figuring out how to compile a custom version of Linux for it and flash it to ROM. I really think X with a light Window manager would work well on that hardware. If I can't, though, I would be content with a newer version of Android. It's currently running Jelly Bean and I'm wondering what the new versions are like.
The only thing I've been able to find out about the device is that it's based on a WonderMedia Prizm WM8880, has 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a 1.5GHz Cortex A9 processor. Mali-400 Graphics. In Google Play, the device is listed as No Carrier WonderMedia GA-1311F. I did a search for GA-1311F, and I found no results.
Note that I don't have an actual Manufacturer or model number, everything I can find digging around leads back to the chipset manufacturer, WonderMedia or some company called WMT. It seems like WonderMedia has ties to VIA technologies, and that they definitely don't make the device I'm using. So that means I have no idea who the manufacturer is.
Is any of this information helpful, or is my device unable to be hacked simply because the manufacturer is too obscure?

Sorry to bump my own thread, but I thought I would mention that I've managed to find out about a method called KingRoot that often works on Android 4.2. I managed to install the APK, but the program got to around 60% and then said my device couldn't be rooted.
I'm not crazy about most of the other methods because they require a USB cable that I don't have. Most Android phones or tablets would presumably have a mini-USB port with a small end for the phone and a large end for the computer, like my Windows Phone does. This machine only has regular-sized USB ports, however, and thus I would need to buy a USB male A to USB male A cord that's capable of performing the same function. I hate to waste the money on it not knowing if it will even work, though. I'm also wondering if I need to worry about crossover vs. patch cables like I would with Ethernet, etc. It's starting to seem like more trouble than it's worth.
There was another method I tried called OneClickRoot, but they told me that I needed to have that same dreaded cable hooked up to my PC, AND pay them $20 on top of it. I'm pretty sure that's ridiculous.
I'm probably going to figure this out eventually, but I'm really frustrated that this is tougher than hacking my Wii was. Embedded systems with non-standard hardware are an amazing pain to deal with.
EDIT: Even thoughc it said it failed, all of a sudden BusyBox installed successfully after I restarted the computer. I think I may have done it, although I'm not sure. Apparently I have a Linux kernel on here already somehow... is that the part of Android that's based on Linux?
imgur.com/HiRyqW2
Still, there's not much I'm finding that tells me how to set up anything much better than using a terminal and a VNC viewer within Android to view a Linux system running on top of it. I guess that could be useful if I had a beefier Android device, but with this it's only useful for a command line.

Hi,
Thanks for using XDA Assist.
Try asking your question in the General Q&A forum:
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Good luck & welcome to Android

Is there any interest in an Ubuntu Touch port?

Hey there, XDA.
So I've been puttering about with Ubuntu Touch on another device I have lately (Fairphone 2) and attempted a couple ports in the past...
(Moto X 2013, gave away to a friend, Galaxy Note 3, ran into a roadblock with partition sizes)
I got to looking at my Shield Tablet and was just thinking about how it'd be a near perfect poster-child for Ubuntu Touch for tablets. The device is still a relative power house, has great specs, native HDMI out for convergence, and even has OEM maintained device trees and kernel sources!
On paper, it's perfect.
So, I was thinking, would anyone else want to see Ubuntu Touch running on this tablet through the UBPorts project? Any dev support would be especially helpful, as Nvidia's hardware is truly a bit...unique.
Before anyone points it out: I am aware that there is a 'native' Ubuntu desktop port already, however it is awfully out of date and the developer does not seem very interested in maintaining it currently (and I don't blame him, considering how much work porting nvidia's L4T sources to the TN8 must be)

Interest from me, I can test. No good at developing though !

Yes of course! There is some interesting on having Linux in shield tablet. There's linux4tegra but it's dependent on lollipop kernel. So it would be nice having a dual boot stock nougat and Ubuntu for shield tablet thanks for the initiative.

Interest from me too. Also without dev skills, but happy to test

Son-j said:
Yes of course! There is some interesting on having Linux in shield tablet. There's linux4tegra but it's dependent on lollipop kernel. So it would be nice having a dual boot stock nougat and Ubuntu for shield tablet thanks for the initiative.
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Well, sadly, might still be dependant on Lollipop blobs/kernel as Ubuntu Touch still relies on Lollipop device trees since it uses libhybris for device support. Most annoying thing about it.

Is it possible to request Ubuntu for an updated kernel dependency?

So, this is embarassing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ05o0RPwUQ
Which version of Ubuntu is this?

Lyokacanthrope said:
Hey there, XDA.
So I've been puttering about with Ubuntu Touch on another device I have lately (Fairphone 2) and attempted a couple ports in the past...
(Moto X 2013, gave away to a friend, Galaxy Note 3, ran into a roadblock with partition sizes)
I got to looking at my Shield Tablet and was just thinking about how it'd be a near perfect poster-child for Ubuntu Touch for tablets. The device is still a relative power house, has great specs, native HDMI out for convergence, and even has OEM maintained device trees and kernel sources!
On paper, it's perfect.
So, I was thinking, would anyone else want to see Ubuntu Touch running on this tablet through the UBPorts project? Any dev support would be especially helpful, as Nvidia's hardware is truly a bit...unique.
Before anyone points it out: I am aware that there is a 'native' Ubuntu desktop port already, however it is awfully out of date and the developer does not seem very interested in maintaining it currently (and I don't blame him, considering how much work porting nvidia's L4T sources to the TN8 must be)
Click to expand...
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@Lyokacanthrope I can help with testing and stuff if we can get it booted

bneo99 said:
@Lyokacanthrope I can help with testing and stuff if we can get it booted
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hah...I kinda put this idea on the backburner cuz I couldn't really get anywhere and ubports/yunit seems to be floundering currently.

Speaking of flounder (aka Nexus 9), it seems that had an [at least booting] Ubports in the past
https://plus.google.com/+Ubports/posts/iCHaKMTXC1y
https://devices.ubports.com/#/flounder_lte

I am very interested indeed. And I can speak for at least two more people that I know.
UBports still seems to be working on Ubuntu Touch, from what I can tell.

How about Plasma Mobile?