We've posted a demo image of Android on the EfikaMX support page. Download it and load to an SD card and give it a try. It will run on either the Smarttop or Smartbook. Wireless support works well and an unofficial apps store is available to try a few applications. Its just a demo image, but you can get a feel for what Android feels like on a non-touchscreen like device. A mouse with a click wheel works best for navigating. Enjoy!

_________________
Dave Mothersole
CTO, Genesi USA Inc.

Please note that you will need the latest u-boot from this site to boot the image.

More information on how to use Android will follow shortly.

_________________
Michael Grunditz
Senior Software Engineer
Genesi USA
http://www.genesi-usa.com
michael.grunditz@genesi-usa.com

Hi,

I tried downloading the image with two browsers (Chromium and Firefox) and in both cases the download cut off at around 425MB. Eventually I was able to download the image with wget. The uncompression did not report errors, I saved it to SD card (dd) but when booting Smartbook with it, I'm getting Kernel panic. The panic happens after mounting root filesystem. There are some messages about errors in the files system though.

Any idea what I can be doing wrong?

Any chance you could post a picture or the actual message you are getting? It will be much easier to assist when we can see the errors.

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

Sure, here it is:

http://download.aros3d.org/pictures/IMG20110323_001.jpg

Can you post MD5 of the image archive so I could verify my download?

I'd like to test it too in my Smartbook. I've downloaded it, successfully I believe, but don't know how to put it in my 4GB (micro)SD HC card. What's that "dd" you mention? Are there tools for Windows to do it?

yes, there are utilities for this:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/asset/by-id/97

We are going to update the image hang on..

_________________
Matt Sealey

You're updating the Android image already? What's changing, if you don't mind my asking? I've actually already tried out the image provided yesterday, and it worked pretty well.

Done.

f43f06e08338371eaa615122a6f527ae android-release-mx.img.xz

We reduced the size of the image by making it a clipped 1.6GB SD card image instead of just a raw dump of the full 2GB SD card (since 2GB SD cards are not always equal). This probably fixes most of the problems where the filesystem says it was "corrupt" (actually, probably 64MB of the fs at the end was chopped off on your SD card).

I also changed the download method to be more reliable and download-manager-friendly.

Everything inside is identical.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Thanks. This one worked for me. Running it now on Smartbook - looks quite nice and is much more snappier than Ubuntu :)

The Android image runs and it looks quite smooth. Except that many applications start becoming unresponsive. It sort of appears to be a network related issue. Does anyone know to what extend Android is supposed to be functional?

It might be network related. Wifi is sometimes a problem.

Have you tried video playback ?

What do you mean by functional ?

Indeed. I've never used Android, looks quite nice. Of course, the computer thiks it's a phone, and that's funny. Very glad to see ful translations into spanish, but hey, that's expected in a commercial product like Android. By the way, it's 2.2.
I had a very, very hard time yesterday to get the Android image here at the office. I downloaded it to our network, and then put it in a local FTP service. Then, as my PC wouldn't like the SD card, I used the very Smartbook to toast it. I got Ubuntu's ImageWriter, which is nothing more than a GUI for "umount" and "dd".
But before, I had to use a pendrive to get the image into the Smartbook: Both ftp and wget got struck with no warning at all, and even getting the image directly from efikamx.info did the same. I'd say that Ubuntu's wifi driver is at fault.
Will try today, but already saw that Tron like 3D game... Good job!
In my opinion, it's a very, vey nice toy. Of course it's much more responsive than Ubuntu, but that's because it does much less things. At first, I misunderstood Ubuntu, but realized that having it running in the Efika MX is mostly heroic. Unmarketable, though. But then, Android is here to make this a useful product for dumm... er, customers.

I'm no dumb customer, and I understand that disclaimer that says Android is only a demo. What I don't understand is saying there's no promises of more development. What?!

And just to make it clear: Amazing job Michael. The fact that I can take it on the go on a simple memory card is brilliant. But that will steal sales for Genesi: Normally, one should buy a second computer to enjoy a second operating system ;-)

There's no camera, Google maps or App store: Although the later two are ovbiously because of a licensing matter, I've been told that some unlicensed chinese Android gizmos come with those. Who knows how they got that. I want to try that own app store you've bundled.

As a side note, there's no single video or song to enjoy media playing. A pity, moreso when the image takes 1500 MB...

Can I plug my SIM card, connect a bluetooth headset, and make a call? THAT would be functional!

By the way, I'm editing this post from my Android Efika right now!

I really disagree.

You think that because you want a quad core 8GB smartbook that will play Crysis: or at least you hope one will be available one day so you can say you have the best.

It is impossible to play these numbers games and stay cost effective. I am sure you would have purchased one if it was $750 - but we know the difference in sales figures between $350 and $200 and they are astonishing.

And of course, everyone at Genesi and several very happy customers use Ubuntu every day, and do not complain about "performance".

Match your expectations to cost, to functionality, and it runs VERY reasonably. I rarely get better performance on my Acer Aspire, and apart from running Compiz on my Lenovo S10-3, both my x86 netbooks running Maverick get almost exactly the same performance in launching Firefox, OpenOffice, doing general tasks, web browsing, Adobe Flash performance and general availability of media codecs.

_________________
Matt Sealey