Hello everyone. In this video,
we'll be going over Android and how to build it from Source.
So, as Simon mentioned,
we're going to describe what Android is and then,
we're going to go into the procedure for building it from Source.
So, just again a brief description,
if you guys haven't heard of Android,
it's an operating system intended for mobile phones and tablets,
and it is one of the two most popular OS's for mobile devices,
the other being iOS.
And is based on a Linux kernel,
and an easy app development which has a large market
because of somebody felt that they're running Android.
It's more widely used than Debian or OpenEmbedded simply because it's on
mobile phones and there's more mobile phones than computers,
and Interface is intended for touch screen,
but it can still be used on the DragonBoard,
you can still use as a keyboard and mouse too.
So, here's the procedure.
If you guys watched the previous two videos,
these bullet points should be just really
familiar to you guys but we're just going to reiterate it.
The first one is you want to familiarize yourself with fastboot,
and this is how you're going to get the image
that you built from source onto your DragonBoard.
So, make sure you go into the instructions that we provided
for fastboot and look at steps one through four to set it up.
And then, we will also provide a 96Boards instruction website.
We'll provide to actually for this one and just follow these.
I'll show you how to navigate through them in a bit.
And, here are some important things to know.
Android is big just like
Debian was so you want to make sure that you have enough space in your computer.
When I was downloading it,
it took like nearly 14 gigabytes,
so it's really really big.
You want to have a virtual machine that can handle that size of operating system.
And the same thing as Debian,
when you install the GCC cross compiler,
it will be in your bin folder not the actual GCC compiler directory.
And also, all in the instructions,
it says to create these two directories,
Kernel Top and Android Top,
and you can just create a new directory you want with names that you can remember.
We just called it Kernel and Android.
Let's go to our laptop to look at some of the instructions.
Okay, so here we are at
our first instruction website and this is how we will build Android from Source.
This is a project that was created to assist us.
So, first you want to make the project itself.
So, we provided you the repositories and how to build it.
So here you would build AOSP which is the project name and afterwards,
you would build Kernel and if you see, if you scroll down,
you would see that it tells you to make cross compile.
So, instead of aarch Android gnu,
we recommend you go on the instructions for Debian again and then, just scroll up,
scroll down I mean,
and you'll see that it gives you a link for the Linaro GCC cross compiler so,
we want you to replace this with the path to that compiler.
So if you go to our Ubuntu host machine,
you will see that the directory will be provided inside our,
I mean, I put the directory inside my Downloads folder,
so let's just go in there and here's the GCC compiler that I myself
extracted from the XXC file,
XC file and then afterwards,
if you want to go into your bin folder.
So, if you go back and then at last,
you will see that specific thing isn't available here.
So you want to actually see the entire bin folder and then,
the files all here,
you will see that all the executables are in here instead.
So, when you sorry,
let's just go back.
When you, sorry, I'm just looking for the command that I did, never mind.
So, let's just go back here and then you see that cross compile equals aarc.
All you want to do is you just want to pwd, and then,
you will see that it's dash home and then dash andrew and afterwards,
you want to put the path which is downloads and then,
the GCC compiler name and then afterwards,
you want to put backslash bin and then,
you want to put aarc dash linux dash gnu instead.
So, like the instructions for this assumes that you have an Android compiler yourself,
but we don't really provide you one so,
we just recommend that you go to the Debian website to download your own cross compiler.
And then afterwards, you want to make the image itself and then,
here we see the less than Android top greater than sign,
and we want you to replace every single instance of
Kernel top and Android top with your own name.
So, what we did was we just called it Kernel without
any capital letters and without the less than and greater than sign.
So, in here you would just do a cd Kernel and then,
in here you are just to Android in our case.
But, just call it whatever is comfortable for you guys and easy for you guys to remember,
and that's all the clarification style I need to provide you guys and,
we just have fun with that I guess,
and we all see you guys next time.
Ganz ChockalingamPrincipal Engineer
Harinath GarudadriAssociate Research Scientist
