[Xoom Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] PityOnU:
Hi all,

I'm hoping some of you guys in the know would lend me a hand here. I recently became the proud owner of a Fusion Garage Grid 10. It's a really great slate that's based on the Tegra 2 platform, just like the Xoom. Unfortunately, unlike the Xoom, it was neither successful nor did it ever run a "true" version of Android. It is also no longer supported by the manufacturer, as the company itself no longer exists (they went bankrupt, big time).

Right now, through the efforts of some other Grid 10-owning community members, there is a stable build of Android 2.2 for the device, which I am currently running. However, I would really like the device to have a working version of the latest Android 4.0.3, not only because the chipset is powerful enough to justify it, but also because the device has no hardware buttons, making navigation in Froyo a bit of a hassle.

To this end, I have starting looking around and trying to learn as much as I can about Android, the nVidia Tegra chipset, and embedded computing in general. Although I have some significant experience with both Linux (I'm a Linux SysAdmin by trade) and Windows (MCSA, MCSE, MCDST, MCTS for Win7), I'm finding that the world of embedded computing is very different from that of the PC.

I was hoping that some of you more learned guys here could tell me if my current understanding of the situation is well-founded, and maybe give me some pointers on where to go from here:

As far as I understand, the easiest (ha!) way for me to go about getting a version of Android 4.0.3 running on the device is to port a build meant for another device to the Grid 10. To do this, I need the boot.img and system.img from another device. After I get those, I need to extract their contents, replace the kernel in the boot.img with the original kernel for my device, and replace the hardware and kernel specific files in the system.img with the corresponding original ones. After this I need to flash the updated images to the device and then debug through adb for a long, long time.

Obviously, that's a bit of an "in a nutshell" overview, but hopefully it is basically correct. Assuming it is, I have started taking steps towards completing this goal. So far I have:

1. Made a 1:1 backup of the internal NAND of the device using nvflash (a partition at a time)

2. Acquired the bootloader.bin, system.img, boot.img, and recovery.img used in the build of Froyo that was created by the community for the device (nvflash is used pretty much exclusively at this point, no update.zip's here!)

3. Downloaded the latest master branch of Android 4.0.3 from the AOSP and compiled it for the Xoom - this generated a boot.img, system.img, and recovery.img of Android 4.0.3 (albeit for another device)

Right now, I am in the middle of trying to transfer the data from the old images into the new one, and am running into some problems. However, I think I've already typed enough, and I don't want to overwhelm you guys with questions, so I'll stop there :p

Is the road I'm heading down right now the way I should be headed if I would like to have Android 4.0.3 running on the device (eventually)? If not, could you please point me in the direction I should be heading?

Thank you in advance, your patience and assistance is very much appreciated :)

~ Kent

MODS - Please feel free to move this to a more appropriate forum if applicable. I posted here because a lot of the issues I am running into revolve around my build of the AOSP for the Xoom, so I figured this would be the best place to ask.