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Wandboard (Android) Resources

Wandboard

Wandboard (Android) Resources.

Android 4.4.2 considerations

The official Wandboard KitKat image has three major flaws:

1. The partition table is highly unusual, placing the third primary partition, i.e. 'data', behind the extended partition. That is just broken by design.

2. The official Google apps are missing (which isn't the fault of the Wandboard folks, btw.)

3. If you managed to get the Google apps running, you could not install paid apps from the PlayStore, since some mandatory kernel options are missing.

I tried to fix these issues as follows:

1. I changed the 'data' partition to be the last logical partition, thus making it easy to size (i.e. you can take the remaining free space of the SD card for it, after creating all the other partitions.) To reflect the change in partition numbering, I compiled a new uramdisk.img file that does the mounting correctly.

2. I incorporated the official Google apps and SuperSU (root) into my 'system' archive.

3. I compiled a new uImage with the appropriate options. Also, I replaced the Wifi modules in the 'system' image to match my kernel. Thus, if you just want to use this uImage, to keep workable Wifi, you need to copy ./Android-4.4.2/kernel/brcmfmac.ko and ./Android-4.4.2/kernel/brcmutil.ko to the ./bin/wifi/ folder of your system partition.

Android 4.4.2 Setup

First of all, download the official Wandboard KitKat image and write it to your card:

  cd /tmp
  wget http://wandboard.org/images/downloads/android-4.4.2-wandboard-20140815.zip
  unzip android-4.4.2-wandboard-20140815.zip
  sudo dd if=android-4.4.2-wandboard-20140815.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

This will take a while.

Now, repartition the Micro SD card and create appropriate filesystems according to the following table. Make sure to leave the first 7 Megabytes of the card as they are since they contain the bootloader.

I recommend using GNU parted for the re-partitioning task.

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags  Label
 1      7746kB  77.5MB  69.7MB  primary   fat32        lba    imx6
 2      77.5MB  178MB   101MB   primary   ext4                rootfs
 3      178MB   15.8GB  15.6GB  extended
 5      179MB   3138MB  2959MB  logical   ext4                system
 6      3139MB  3678MB  539MB   logical   ext4                cache
 7      3679MB  3692MB  12.6MB  logical   ext4                vendor
 8      3693MB  3706MB  12.6MB  logical   ext4                misc
 9      3707MB  15.8GB  12.1GB  logical   ext4                data

Partition number 9 can be freely sized depending on the size of the card.

Partition number 1 is FAT32:

  sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n imx6 /dev/sdX1

All other partitions are ext4:

  sudo mkfs.ext4 -L <Label> /dev/sdXY

Mount partition number 1 to a temporary location and populate it with the contents of the ./Android-4.4.2/imx6/ directory:

  sudo mkdir -p /mnt/tmp
  sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/tmp
  sudo rsync -a --progress ./Android-4.4.2/imx6/ /mnt/tmp/
  sudo umount /mnt/tmp

Download the system archive (rooted and with gapps) to a temporary location:

  cd /tmp
  wget http://www.tk-webart.de/projekte/wandboard/2014-09-18-wandboard-android-4.4.2-system_rooted+gapps.tar.xz

Mount partition number 5 to a temporary location and populate it with the contents of the previously downloaded archive:

  sudo mount /dev/sdX5 /mnt/tmp
  cd /mnt/tmp
  sudo tar xpf /tmp/2014-09-18-wandboard-android-4.4.2-system_rooted+gapps.tar.xz
  cd
  sudo umount /mnt/tmp
  sudo sync

Eject the Micro SD card and insert it into the Wandboard's CPU module slot.

Boot up and enjoy Android 4.4.2 'KitKat'!