[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III Android Development] Phasi:
Questions: Installing on Kaiser with HARET, aTools

Hello Android hackers,

Thanks to Scoot and all contributors for porting Android. I just broke my phone and inherited this HTC Tilt from a friend. Windows Mobile (6.1) is making me crazy. Hoping to upgrade to some form of Android.

But trying to get Android working on my old HTC Tilt (Kaiser) has nearly pushed me over the edge. Three days, trying out four different Android versions, minimum of 100 installation attempts, and 1000+ posts read. Wow. At one time I thought I was a competent developer.

At last I have Scoot's CyanogenMod 6.1.2 RLS3 working, even the WiFi. Would one of the experts here please answer some orientation questions, so I can continue to move forward?

First, I am booting via haret-for-kernel-2-6-32.exe. That's because I need to be able to revert quickly to a working phone when something goes wrong.

1) I want to experiment with the settings for screen type, keyboard, and overclocking. These are specified in the default.txt boot file. For example (from Scoot),

set cmdline "no_console_suspend ppp.nostart=0 clock-7x00.ahb_div=4 clock-7x00.a11=500 hw3d.version=1 mddi.width=240 mddi.height=320 board-htckaiser.panel_type=0 board-kaiser-keypad.atttilt=0 clock_7x00.grp=0xa99"

a. Where can I find docs that explain these settings, especially the clock-related ones?

b. Are these settings baked in at installation, or can they be changed with a simple reboot?

c. The Tilt's screen occasionally goes all white, then multi-colored snow, then the proper image. Can that be fixed by meddling with the screen type setting?

2) It seems that most of my failures were due to a mismatch between the installation and zImage and initrd. At least the few successes happened by switching in various zImage's and then trying various initrd's until something installed, booted Android, ran Android without crashing, and enabled WiFi. Failures happened at all of these four points.

a. So do particular installations have to be installed and booted with a particular zImage and initrd?

b. If in fact a zImage has to run with a certain initrd, when I find a zImage someone has posted ("the ultimate, works, fixes that or that"), how do I know which initrd it will work with? I ended up trying first the initrd from the repository that had a nearby date to the zImage. Is there any better method?

(Source for initrd and some zImage's...

androidhtc.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=androidhtc/kernel-release.git;a=summary

)

3) aTools (1.3.0) remains a mystery. Many installations provide only a Kaiser.nbh that is configured for ROM installation. I tried to edit these into a zImage/initrd I could use with Haret, with zero success rate.

a. I think the purpose of aTools is to take an existing nbh file, which in effect contains a kernel and configuration, allow editing of the configuration contained in the nbh, and help produce a zImage/initrd/default.txt that accomplishes the same installation via Haret.

Is this understanding close?

b. What I have tried is opening the Kaiser.nbh that is provided with a particular installation, (the Kaiser settings then appear), changing the mode to Haret, (the settings change from NAND to system.img, etc.), then saving zImage/initrd. My expectation is that Kaiser.img contains a kernel tuned to the particular Android installation and that aTools makes a zImage that contains that special kernel.

Various posts refer to aTools "downloading" the zImage. So is the kernel produced by aTools in Haret mode based on the kernel in the Kaiser.nbh file I opened? Or is it downloaded from the repository (taking only the configuration settings from Kaiser.nbh)? If the latter, it's no wonder that none of my attempts worked.

c. How then does one derive a proper zImage/initrd for Haret for an installation when only the .nbh for ROM installation is provided?

Thanks so much helping me to get oriented!

Doug