Building Ubuntu Touch Android pieces from source

Whether you want to build Ubuntu Touch for the currently supported Nexus devices or want to port it to a new target, you need to set up your working environment to build Android from source. This setup is more or less the same whether you are building AOSP or a project based on it such as CyanogenMod, SEAndroid or Ubuntu Touch.

If you are new to building Android sources you may want to check out this document and others in the Getting Started section on the Google documentation site, as it covers the basics and terminology of AOSP building. While Ubuntu Touch uses some helper scripts as detailed below, if will nonetheless be helpful to understand what is going on under the hood especially if you want to work on this part of the project.

http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html

For Ubuntu Touch, you can find all the needed Android git repositories at http://phablet.ubuntu.com/gitweb. This is basically a mirror of CyanogenMod 10.1, but containing only the needed low level services used by Android (e.g. no Dalvik at all).

For any Android related project on our git server, you'll find a branch named phablet-10.1. This branch contains a static known git HEAD and the required changes needed for Ubuntu, including our custom Android manifest.

Set up your development environment

To support a wide range of devices, we decided to use CyanogenMod as a base for the Android system. You could safely use AOSP, as we don't use a lot of the customizations and improvements done at the App/Java side, but it's easier with CyanogenMod due the scripts and build procedures available for it.

Everything we take from Android is just C/C++, so you'll notice that your Android build environment will be way smaller than when comparing to the traditional Android builds.

For development you can run any 64-bit Desktop version of Ubuntu between 12.04 LTS and 13.04.

It's not strictly necessary, but it's helpful to install ccache. (http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html#ccache in the general Android Setup guide should help with this.)

Additional packages which are used to build the host tools:

$ sudo apt-get install git gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential \
  zip bzr curl libc6-dev libncurses5-dev:i386 x11proto-core-dev \
  libx11-dev:i386 libreadline6-dev:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 \
  libgl1-mesa-dev g++-multilib mingw32 tofrodos \
  python-markdown libxml2-utils xsltproc zlib1g-dev:i386 schedtool

You'll also need to set up the tools PPA. This will also install the repo tool, used to sync the Android repositories. Learn more about the repo tool.

All the Android code can be downloaded from the phablet-dev-bootstrap tool provided by the phablet-tools package installed in the previous step:

To get the code setup run:

• phablet-dev-bootstrap [target_directory]

If for some reason the sync ends midway, you can continue the sync with the -c switch, so the command would be:

• phablet-dev-bootstrap -c [target_directory]

Alternatively, if you are just building an image for an already supported device, you can specify the -v switch:

• phablet-dev-bootstrap -v [device codenames] [target_directory]

The phablet-dev-bootstrap command will automatically use the repo tool with the Ubuntu Touch Preview custom manifest to download all the git repositories and needed data. Be aware that this step takes a long time and requires at least 15GB (plus 2-3GB for the binary output).

Getting the vendor blobs

In order to have a functional Android image some proprietary bits need to be included for all devices. These are not redistributable so they should be grabbed from a running device booted into Android. These files go under vendor/<vendorname>/<devicename> in our case vendor/lge/mako. Make sure you have the device running Android and connected via USB, with USB Debugging under Developer Settings enabled and run the ./extract-file.sh script under device/lge/mako . This will populate that directory with files from the device.

For Nexus devices google provides factory images https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

At the moment Google provides factory images for 4.2.2 which on the Nexus 4 at least are not compatible with Ubuntu Touch, the latter being still based on 4.2.1 Better grab the blobs from here for the moment

https://github.com/gdetal/vendor_lge_mako

Building for an existing device

Here's how to build Ubuntu Touch for the Nexus 4 (Android codename mako)

Since only a subset of the whole Android tree is used and built for Ubuntu Touch, the build is much faster than a full AOSP or CyanogenMod build. Still using CCACHE can help if you are doing multiple builds or have multiple target devices Build for the target you want. Valid names are mako (Nexus 4) grouper (Nexus 7) manta (Nexus 10) maguro (Galaxy Nexus)

export USE_CCACHE=1
. build/envsetup.sh
brunch mako
}}

== Flashing the image ==


After the build out/target/product/mako will have all device specific build artifacts such as boot.img, system.img, userdata.img, recovery.img which can be flashed using fastboot to the respective partitions like
fastboot flash boot boot.img.

Another way of installing the system is by just flashing recovery.img (a Clockworkmod image with some Ubuntu changes) via fastboot and then loading zip files via Clockworkmod, either by explicitly installing from the menu, or pushing the image as autodeploy.zip. First install the Android image and then the Ubuntu image.
The Android image is in the same out/target/produce/mako directory.
The latest Ubuntu image can be found here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-touch-preview/daily-preinstalled/current/quantal-preinstalled-phablet-armhf.zip
{{{

adb push cm-10.1-20130326-UNOFFICIAL-mako.zip /sdcard/autodeploy.zip
adb reboot recovery
adb push quantal-preinstalled-phablet-armhf.zip /sdcard/autodeploy.zip
adb reboot recovery

Porting

Now that you are comfortable with building Ubuntu Touch and have tested it on an existing device, you may want to take another step and port it to new hardware.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Porting