Android Source

May 31, 2013

I wanted to get a copy of the android source and take a look at it. In particular I wanted to look at some details pertaining to the Motorola Xoom tablet.

Someone on the xdadevelopers forums said (without explanation) (in June of 2011) to get:

android.git.kernel.org, kernel/tegra.git project, android-tegra-2.6.36-honeycomb-mr1 head/branch

The above makes no sense whatsoever at this stage of my understanding.

Apparently the site kernel.org was compromised, a couple of years ago (fall of 2011), and has never been reestablished (kind of surprising). Note that this compromise (and the vanishing of kernel.org) happened after the above posting.

The android source is now hosted elsewhere. Instructions for downloading it in this day and age from source.android.com tell me to do the following:

curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x bin/repo
mkdir androidsource
cd androidsource
repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest
repo sync

The repo command is a front end for "git". The "repo" command never does ask me for my real name and email address as they said it would The sync operation is busy as a beaver (they estimate it will take an hour). It doesn't take nearly that long (but I am on a fast link).

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]