Android 4.0 on ST Ericsson Snowball Development Board

Android 4.0.1 can now run on ST Ericsson Nova A9500 low cost development board “snowball”. The build is available at https://android-build.linaro.org/builds/~linaro-android/staging-snowball/.

You can Android 4 (ICS) it in action in the Snowball board in the video build using build number 84. This is a bit sluggish since Android 4 currently lacks hardware acceleration on this development board but Linaro and the igloocommunity will implement it in the next few weeks.

If you have an ST Ericsson snowball board, here are the instructions to try the latest Android 4.0 build for the platform:

• Get the images:

wget –no-check-certificate https://android-build.linaro.org/jenkins/job/linaro-android_staging-snowball/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/out/target/product/snowball/boot.tar.bz2
wget –no-check-certificate https://android-build.linaro.org/jenkins/job/linaro-android_staging-snowball/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/out/target/product/snowball/system.tar.bz2
wget –no-check-certificate https://android-build.linaro.org/jenkins/job/linaro-android_staging-snowball/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/out/target/product/snowball/userdata.tar.bz2

• Get the linaro-image-tools and create the image:

bzr branch lp:linaro-image-tools

./linaro-image-tools/linaro-android-media-create –mmc /dev/sdc –dev snowball_sd –system system.tar.bz2 –userdata userdata.tar.bz2 –boot boot.tar.bz2

• MINICOM settings:

minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -w -C minicom.txt

• You must setup the boot args as follows:

U8500 $ setenv loadbootscript fat load mmc 1:1 ${loadaddr} /boot.scr
U8500 $ saveenv
Saving Environment to EMMC…
Writing to EMMC… done
U8500 $ run bootcmd

The next time the board will boot automatically, but  on the first boot, the user interface can take up to 10 minutes to come up. If the board doesn’t come up you might be affected by https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro-landing-team-ste/+bug/823313

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