Android Panda Always Innovating
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[edit] Installation and config of Always Innovating's Android ICS distro for Pandaboard
As of August 2012, the quickest and easiest way to get a fully funtional install of Android 4 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) complete with SGX graphics accel, wifi, bluetooth etc. etc. on a Pandaboard is to use a prebuilt disk image kindly provided by Always Innovating.
[edit] Download links
There is no official site hosting AI ICS but it can currently be downloaded from rapidshare. 4.0.1 only supports original Pandaboards whilst 4.0.3b supports the ES too:
https://rapidshare.com/files/3911501276/panda-ics-4.0.1.zip
md5sum 2dde6197bc23d858124ad7e106e5bcd6
https://rapidshare.com/files/15358511/panda-ics-4.0.3.b.zip
md5sum 03755f6834c3b25779ad17dd633cbbc7
[edit] Installation
See the README included within the zip for install instructions. You will need at least a 4GB SD card. The 4.0.3b version doesn't quite fit onto but should still work fine with a 4GB card.
[edit] Known Issues
There is no support included for onboard audio but audio should work fine via HDMI and also via class compliant USB audio devices. If you need onboard audio you need to compile Android or use another distro.
Video output is limited to 1280x720 - fix unknown.
If you plug a DVI display into the HDMI port you will likely experience lots of flickering so make sure you use the correct port for your display.
With the 4.0.1 release on an original Pandaboard, pushing the power button prompts you if you'd like to power off but if you choose to do so Android reboots instead of shutting down.
These builds both feature a semi-transparent text advert for Always Innovating's Dongle (for which these builds were created) and website in the bottom left of the Android desktop. It is currently unknown if this can be easily disabled or not.
You may experience crackly, distorted sound when playing MP3s. This is because AI ICS defaults to using the 'Interactive' CPU governor which needs to be changed to 'Performance' to get smooth MP3 playback. To fix this Android must be rooted and you will need to install an app such as No-Frills CPU control or SetCPU to change the default governor.
You cannot install apps via Google Play under the included browser or Chrome (beta) - apps can be installed by clicking on their apk file under Astro or ES File Explorer. This is a general problem of running Android on Panda and not specific to this distro.
I have been unable to get the included videos to play with the video player when running 4.0.3b on my Pandaboard A4 but video playback works fine under 4.0.1
Settings/Storage doesn't work at all for me under 4.0.3b but works fine under 4.0.1
The developer has not responded to any questions (such as how to disable the advert or provide complete build instructions) made about these releases on the Pandaboard mailing list and it is currently impossible to register on the AI forums because their captcha is broken. However, the developer did post to the Pandaboard mailing list in August 2012 promising a new release within weeks which will hopefully resolve most of these issues.
[edit] How to 'root' AI ICS
If you want USB drives to be auto-mounted on insertion then you need to install StickMount. If you want to have access to the standard GNU and Linux command line tools from a terminal (which also isn't included) then you need to install Busybox - however both of these apps require root permissions to run and AI ICS does not come 'pre-rooted' by including the Superuser packages which you can download from:
http://downloads.noshufou.netdna-cdn.com/superuser/Superuser-3.1.3-arm-signed.zip
You only need to extract two files from the Superuser zip, Superuser.apk needs to be copied to /system/app/ and su to /system/bin/ of the first partition of your Android drive. After copying the files to their correct dirs, set the permissions as such:
chmod 777 Superuser.apk chmod u+xs su
You can test root is working by simply running the su command from a terminal.
