Two queries about Android installation

[James Ancona]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 6:59 AM, Neil Jerram <neiljerram at googlemail.com>wrote:

> I'm interested in taking a look at Android...
>
> 1. The installation instructions seem to involve both a full SD card
> (which will be completely overwritten) and flashing the NAND.  What I
> don't understand is whether the SD card is only needed during
> installation, or if the same SD card needs to stay in the phone
> afterwards, when booting Android from NAND.
>

The installer puts all of Android in NAND. After installation the SD card is
only used for extra storage (web downloads, media, etc.) Any FAT formatted
SD card will do. You can run with no SD card in there, but as I recall, some
things don't work.

>
> 2. I understand that the Android installation flashes a modified
> version of the Qi bootloader.  Can this modified version still boot
> other distributions, in particular Debian?
>

It should boot other distributions from SD. The modification is because
Andoid uses a different NAND partition layout. If you want to replace
Android with a different distribution in NAND, you should reflash Qi.

Hope that helps!

Jim


>
> Basically the situation is that I want to keep Debian (on SD) as my
> main distribution, but have Android in NAND for trying out.  I have
> another SD card (512Mb) that I can use just for the Android install,
> but after that I'd like to put the Debian SD card back in.
>
> Thanks for any answers and advice!
>
>    Neil
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/attachments/20100424/5caf5fa7/attachment.htm