Two queries about Android installation

[Christian Rüb]

Neil Jerram wrote:
> On 24 April 2010 21:59, James Ancona <jim at anconafamily.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> > 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!
> 
> Yes thanks, it does.  It tells me that I can't switch between Debian
> and Android completely seamlessly - but that I can at least do it by
> swapping SD cards.  Which is probably OK for now.
> 
> FWIW, my reason for asking is that I'm now hoping to find something a
> bit more swishy and impressive than just basic phone function.  Debian
> has been fine for me for basic phone function for some time now, and I
> expect to keep that as my mainstay.  But I'd love to be able to
> demonstrate how cool the FR is by saying "but look, it can also run
> Android, here...".
> 
> Regards,
>          Neil

I had similar reasons to try Android - another being is the browser ;-)
You can use an SD only version, which is documented in this thread [1] and mirrored here [2].
I have _normal_ Qi as bootloader and Android + SHR on my SD which looks like this:
p[FAT, for Android data] p[ext3, Androit rootfs] p[ext3, SHR rootfs] e[ext3 data] e[swap]
NAND holds an SHR-U of known state that is functional for basic calling - just in case...

What I really miss though are easy updates for Android on SD.

Cheers,
 Christian

[1] http://code.google.com/p/android-on-freerunner/issues/detail?id=7
[2] http://openmoko.senfdax.de/android/