As shown in this PocketNow Article, This thread is the backup/archive for the Android-on-veerTiny Droid project.
Before we get into it though, here are some things you should know about.
- You should probably know a thing or two on how to work with LVM and just unbricking your device in general.
- The battery indicator does not work. The original (archived) page says that only Keyboard, WiFi and Touchscreen (including gestures) works. I can't test cellular as the towers have shut down, as well as the SIM card port on my Veer is damaged. Camera also does not work, and even if it did there'd be more setup you will have to do to get it to save pictures.
- You can Doctor your Veer without bricking, but the Android LV created will stay which you can manually remove after. I personally used a combination of CLI and Tailor.
So, what are the prerequisites?
- At least ~1.2GB free on your visible USB storage on your Veer.
- A little bit of Novacom know-how.
What to download?
Alright, so how do I install this?
- Connect your Veer to your PC with USB storage enabled.
- Copy
android-rootfs.tar and boot.tar to the root of your visible storage.
- Eject the Veer from your computer.
- Put the Veer into Recovery mode, this can be done by holding VOL+ button when powered up, keep it held down until you see the USB symbol.
- On Windows, make sure to use Command Prompt and not Powershell as it does not support the way the command is formatted.
- Connect the Veer to your PC, then, assuming you have
novacom in your path, just navigate to where your uImage.install is and then do novacom boot mem:// < uImage.install, now you should see your Veer verbose booting the image. Let it do its thing, it usually takes around 5 minutes.
- That's it, your Veer now has Android 2.3 installed!
Feature Overview
- Your Veer will now have moboot 0.3.5 installed, and just like a TouchPad, you can now do dualboot with both webOS and Android installed.
- The Android image does not have Play Services installed, instead it has a chinese app store which does not seem to function anymore. As far as I currently know, there's really no way to install other apps for it (Android Enthusiasts, please chime in as I'm out of ideas on how I could get something installed. Downloading is not possible as the device is missing an "SD Card", and the USB port doesn't communicate while in Android.
I want to uninstall it, how do I do that?
Reboot back to webOS.
Establish a tty connection using novacom. Do novacom -t open tty:// to access your Veer's console terminal.
Do lvscan to see what partitions we have, you should see the following:
ACTIVE '/dev/store/root' [456.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/var' [64.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/update' [16.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/log' [24.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/mojodb' [144.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/filecache' [136.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/media' [5.13 GB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/swap' [104.00 MB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/store/android' [1.00 GB] inherit
Now this should not be necessary, but let's make sure that /dev/store/android isn't currently mounted somewhere, so do df -h to make sure.
If you don't see the LV mounted anywhere, proceed with the following command:
lvremove /dev/store/android. This will remove the logical volume.
(Optional) We can also remove the Android boot option from moboot by doing the following:
# mount -o remount,rw /boot && cd /boot && rm uImage.android
What this command does is that it remounts the /boot LV into read-write, then changes the directory to it, and then removes the Android uImage.
Keep in mind that moboot will still be active. You can however (optionally) remove that (though not recommended) by doing the following:
- Before you do, this could possibly brick your Veer. I have not personally tested this and I'm just referencing the LuneOS install guide as they function similarly under the hood.
- Remove the current uImage symlink:
rm uImage
- Symlink
uImage.webos to uImage: ln -sf uImage.webos uImage
- Do
ls -l to make sure that the changes are saved. Look for uImage -> uImage.webos somewhere.
