[Nook HD, HD+ Android Development] amaces:
Selected FAQs

Should I use AOSP or CM/Lineage?

Depends entirely upon personal preference, which requires testing, and some amount of research into what makes a ROM different. There are substantial core differences between the two flavors, which are not obvious immediately. If installing for the first time, flip a coin (and avoid builds in experimental, of course).

How do I get root back?

Until recently, some type of SU binary was included with all ROMs (WITH_SU=true on CM/Lineage, or using this repo on AOSP). This was needed because third-party system-less solutions don't work with our quirky bootimages, and system-mode installers have other issues on N. As builds mature, I'm separating the SU backend from main OTAs, roughly like CM/Lineage did. On my Nougat builds, there are currently two system-mode options:

On AOSP, I adapted phh's OSS backend for system-mode install (addonsu-phh-arm.zip). You need the matching manager to control access. Later on, I ported CM/Lineage's AppOps-based SU to AOSP, so that addon works here as well (see next item). These binaries need to be flashed after every ROM update, same as GApps.

On CM/Lineage, you can install their official add-on (addonsu-arm-signed.zip); it will use the baked-in manager, so no extra APK required. Or, you can install phh's SU and manager, like on AOSP. Neither needs to be flashed more than once here given the existing addon.d support.

Why no official CM/Lineage builds since 12.0?

The answer involves both technical complications, and some amount of politics. Getting changes accepted for non-mainstream/deprecated platforms like ours has been an uphill battle. Over time, many OMAP4 improvements have been developed outside CM, formerly by OMAP4-AOSP, now the Unlegacy-Android project. Those common hardware improvements have made it into 13.0/14.1 only recently, due to other people's perseverance. Although we're much closer to upstream Lineage compatibility, the hundreds of device tree, and more than a thousand kernel changes would still need to go through review. Given how long that takes for each item, and occasional opposition from non-OMAP4 reviewers, I decided to allocate my resources towards bettering these devices rather than official status. The downside is that people may feel dependent on my builds, which shouldn't be the case; I constantly rebase and maintain complete manifests, optimized for these devices. All the relevant changes are open and available in public GitHub repositories, which means anyone can submit them/try to work with upstream Lineage. However, for the above reasons, it's unlikely that I will make that effort.

What's the current status of full screen casting, Miracast, HDMI, etc?

Full screen casting to a Chromecast sink (either real, or emulated) works on all current Nougat builds. CM13 builds may have issues there, but AOSP M was fixes. Chrome casting from apps (the preferred way, if available) was never broken. Miracast in AOSP is pretty much legacy tech now. It also requires more hardware support compared to Chromecast-ing, and it probably doesn't work on any recent builds. Fixing HDMI is still a goal; it got broken on our devices after some Marshmallow revision. Until HDMI can be fixed, I disabled it completely to recover its unused VRAM allocation.