JADDOG

Got to fiddle with Honeycomb on the nook again last night. My wife went to the gym with a friend after the kids went to bed, so I commandeered it again. I’m even happier with honeycomb after my second night of working with it than I was the first.

Tonight I came to some conclusions about some of the initial trouble I was having and got adb working properly with Fedora 14. There’s not a whole lot of info about getting adb on Fedora working with the nook so I’ll provide my config files.

I started with a fresh image tonight and worked through the setup I had already done. Here are my conclusions from this experience.
1. Initial performance issues seem related to the dalvik-cache. Once that’s been generated things run much smoother.
In an attempt to get the overclocked kernel working before I started again from scratch I did the rm * on the dalvik-cache referenced in the link from my last post.
This made the nook run very slow again. Then when I booted the fresh image I again got the same horrible performance. In particular the initial boot took a long time. Once booted I would select the “wait” option at “force quit or wait” prompts. These slowly thinned out in frequency. Once I stopped seeing them all together things seemed to run pretty smooth and responsive.
2. the overclocked kernel bombs after I setup my wireless.
While starting from scratch I rebooted the overclocked kernel a couple times. No problems getting the nook booted on it until I setup my wireless.
3. The wireless needs work.
I cat get the nook connected to my router (Apple Airport Extreme), but the speed is slow. I also noticed that when I was trying to initially connect that my AP would jump in and out of the available connections.

adb
There were lots of posts that talked about adding a file in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory. I also needed a file in the ~/.android directory. Here’s my final two config files:

dradez@tirreno:~➤ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”18d1″, MODE=”0666″, OWNER=”dradez”
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”2080″, MODE=”0666″, OWNER=”dradez”

dradez@tirreno:~➤ cat .android/adb_usb.ini
0×2080

after I had those in place and udev bounced adb showed up in the adb devices command and I was able to use all the sdk tools as the docs suggest.

I look forward to the wireless getting more stable. I love the interface and look forward to installing some more apps to work with. Hopefully I can figure out how to contribute to making things better.

New version of nushus is available for download.
More bug fixes and a couple more small features.
Have been enjoying the time to spend on it.

https://fedorahosted.org/nushus
Release Notes: https://fedorahosted.org/nushus/wiki/Release

My wife got a color nook for Christmas. Last week I came across this link: Honeycomb on the Nook Color
That link has a bunch of great links to where all the information came from. You have to register to get them. Registration was painless so I’ll not spend time reposting them. For reference, my laptop runs Fedora 14.

Having a color nook in the house and non-destructive way to boot honeycomb I had to try it. So I commandeered my wife’s nook tonight and plugged in a micro sd chip I had imaged from the link above. This was my first experience with android beyond just poking at someone else’s device for a couple minutes. Here’s a few thoughts from the experience.

I imaged the sd chip with the 04 version of the honeycomb image. I also went ahead and installed the overclocked (er, not underclocked?) kernel on to the chip.
First boot failed, the nook’s os booted after a bit. I though this may have been related to needing to push a button. After this evening’s experience I think it’s just that the boot failed. I rebooted the device and this time it booted into honeycomb. I was hooked as soon as I unlocked the lock screen.

First thing I did was browsed the settings app. It was unstable. I got wireless configured and started to setup my email. The unstableness continued. I was asked often if I wanted to wait or force quit processes because they weren’t responding. I never got email setup, I wanted to reboot to see if the instability gets worse over time. I couldn’t get it to boot again. I would get the text “android” with a blinking underscore behind it. The underscore would stop blinking and the nook wouldn’t even fail back to boot from the internal drive. I later tried clearing the cache like in the overclock instructions. That didn’t help either.

I had to pull the chip out of the nook and plug it back into my laptop to swap back to the 800mhz processor to continue.

I finally got email configured… had some keyboard weirdness where keys that I wasn’t near with my finger would act as they were touched and write to my input lines. Further the next buttons would take a long time. I later figured that the wireless was a bit flakey and I was probably battling with that. I didn’t experience this again either.

Next I investigated installing Market.
I had never downloaded the android sdk, turns out that’s how/where the application abd is installed. The Market instructions referenced this app. I never got adb to work. It kept telling me it couldn’t find the device. So I added a device that pointed to the sd card in my laptop. That still didn’t make adb work, though that showed me the basics of how to build out an android vm on your laptop. The vm wasn’t any faster than the nook, maybe slower. I read a little bit about the sdk and figured that it will be more useful later if I try and debug some of what’s happening instead of just leeching off of other people’s work.

Moving on with the market install, I ended up just finding the directories on the sdcard that the market install references and copying the apk files to the referenced locations. I guess that’s all adb push and pull do… copy the files. I think adb will be more useful if I can figure out how to hook it up to the nook while the nook has honeycomb booted. I took a few mins to look into how to hook adb up to the nook booted off the sd card, but it wasn’t quite as straight forward as I would have hoped.

As the instructions suggested, I had to reboot a couple times to get market to work. I eventually got registered with google and tried to download a couple apps. They queued and never started to download.

By this time my wife was ready to get her nook back. Barnes & Noble is selling them new for $199 on Ebay until tomorrow morning. Too bad I don’t have $200 bucks in my back pocket to grab one. I imagine we’ll battle over nook time in the near future.

Final thoughts,
I like honeycomb on the nook. It seems very promising. With an overclocked stable kernel I think the user experience will be very positive.
I’m not sure what I think about the android SDK yet. I wasn’t really intending to get to involved in it, but I’ve realized I may have to just to do the Nook/Honeycomb thing. This intrigues me. It’s also probably my next step in this adventure if I plan to make any progress beyond sitting and waiting for someone else to spend their evenings stabilizing it all.