HOW IT BEGAN..
Some time ago neighbor brought me to look on his granddaughter’s „broken“ ACER Extensa 5630Z notebook. When i saw BIOS and booting i told him its not broken, only Windows is.. So i took it to fix the Win Vista on that machine. The problem was black screen after system boot, with the mouse cursor in the center of screen. Thats all it did, only thing working and able to set a window is 5x shift, giving a typo helper we sure wont ever need, no ctrl+alt+del, no nothing. I tried to fix it with many ways i found on the net, nothing. Internal logs are clear except for some irrelevant things, explorer and so on was set fine in registry, i was desperate on that.. The point is i had to fix it in place because nor neighbor, nor i have Vista install DVD and both of us wont ever download it.. The System Restore doesnt work as i expected, ending with errors. There is no way to make the Windows work except for reinstall..yeah 🙂
so..
I gave chance to LINUX!
First, i tried Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, which refused to boot until -noacpi parameter was set.. NO INSTALL THEN..
Then i tried Manjaro KDE-Next 2015.08 and it booted OK.. but new Plasma5 is too new and essential things are not done on Manjaro – i just tried to make folder with file manager, its not possible(right click menu item is not there, found this issue only on Manjaro so far) ..i had to open terminal and do „mkdir“ so.. Ow, NOES!
After that i tried Debian „jessie“ with KDE4.. bootting ok, HW acceleration fine.. so.. INSTALL IT! (right after a little re-partitioning 😛 )
There are some issues in the debian as well..
-there is no Firefox in repository!!! when i installed its fork Iceweasel, it had no flash! so i had to download source tarball „for other linux“ from Adobe site and copy libflashplayer.so from the file to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ to make flash work.. *users dont care* about strict free policy!
-hard times to install WINE!!! THE HELL!!! manual installation of mono runtime!!! after lots of pain there was no WINE’s item in menu until installed first program through regular Win installer whose mostly end up with errors! So i had to manually assign programs to OWN KDE’s menu folder..
Then i had worst idea ever: try ANDROID x86 on that machine..
Downloading the ISO & ordinary work on unetbootin to boot from USB..was ok..
Booting.. was OK..
But.. when i tried to install Angry Birds and a few other landscape games from Play Store i found a hazy font issue which i thought will be gone after installation..
It was not gone so i tried to fix it..
Another big problem is that both touchpad and mouse controls do not work in *any* of 3D games i tried.. There may be some issue with outuput screen names so NONE OF SCREENSHOT APPs was able to make regular screenshot..(black or underlying layers)..LOL? 😀
..AND..
ONE HAVE TO SIT DOWN WHEN FINDS THERE IS NO USABLE WAY TO ZOOM IN/OUT!!! except for doubleclick which is mostly not working.. (it works in Angry Birds, but not in rest of Angry Bird games and so on)
THE STORY of FIXING HAZY FONT ISSUE:
googling gave me:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/android-x86/EZb7cny1yf0
a mail list where some guy with same problem got an answer..
„that device is using intel GMA X45(4500) gpu and I have the same, with the same issue at times….
seems to be related to mesa & Config_PWM / Config_PWM_CRC with drm driver possibly
search these forums, it’s being worked by the mesa dev’s & upstream as well….so I just deal with it for now knowing it’ll
be solved….also you can(if you build your own) drop back to mesa 10.4.2 and / or just remove all the Config_PWM settings
in the defconfig kernel file and rebuild……worked fine for me“
So i went to recompile KERNEL from SOURCE..
ANOTHER HELL I DO NOT RECOMMEND TO EVER TRY!!!
THE SOURCE HAS 20,1 GB AT THIS TIME!!!
I have found instructions here:
http://www.android-x86.org/documents/customizekernel
http://www.arachnoid.com/android/Android-x86/index.html
help on config file:
http://osdir.com/ml/android-x86/2011-06/msg00348.html
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/android-x86/x5aBNnK4Ols
HERES WHAT I DID
get the source files:
WARNING! THIS WILL DOWNLOAD ~14GB!!!
PROCESS CANNOT BE RESUMED AS FAR AS I KNOW!
open terminal as normal user IN YOUR HOME DIR and do:
$ mkdir android-x86
$ cd android-x86
$ repo init -u http://git.android-x86.org/manifest -b kitkat-x86
$ repo sync
to compile just go to android-x86 folder, open terminal as ROOT and do:
$ . build/envsetup.sh
$ export ARCH=x86
$ lunch android_x86-eng
-then goes the config part where i configure parameters i need
$ make -C kernel O=/home/k/bin/android-x86/kernel/arch/x86/configs ARCH=x86 xconfig
!!! I FOUND *LOTS* OF COMPLAINS ABOUT THIS LINE BEING WRONG AROUND THE NET !!!
THE THING IS THAT WHEN YOU DO „MAKE KERNEL“ IT LOOKS INTO FOLDER SPECIFIED ABOVE AND PEOPLE GIVE THEIR DIFFERENT FOLDERS AS PARAMETER TO „TARGET_KERNEL_CONFIG=“
WHICH IS WRONG!!! GIVING YOUR FOLDER AS A PARAMETER MAKES „make“ TO DO SUCH FOLDER IN YOUR ROOT DIR AND YOU PROCEED WITH DEFAULT CONFIG!!! CONFIG AFTER USE IS IN THE $OUT/target/product/x86/obj FOLDER!!!
steps to build the KERNEL:
$ make kernel -j4 TARGET_PRODUCT=android_x86 TARGET_KERNEL_CONFIG=.config
note it can take days on notebooks.. on my AMD Phenom II x4 @ 3,7GHz it takes ~30 minutes
THE „-j4“ PARAMETER SAYS TO USE 4 CPUS
LOVELY LOOK ON OWN COMPILED KERNEL 😉
SIDE NOTE:
i recommend to make a full copy of the android-x86 directory, watch it with Linux Mint’s Nemo and similar things because the copying utilizes fully one core and it was reporting it will take 1h 45m, Gnome Commander made it in 30 minutes.. yeah make full copy even with .pack files, for being sure you wont download it again.. (7z compressed it had ~13,5GB, took 1h) both copying and packing is recommended as ROOT, it can throw errors and quit if you wont just wait and open some file from there..
when files in source directory get messed, you can launch (normal user) „repo status“ in directory where you first run the repo command (.repo folder is there) giving output of what have been changed from default or deleted..
in case we need to revert deleted or changed files simply use „repo forall -vc „git reset –hard““ (watch it for the outer quotes)
THE TROUBLES PART:
THE DEFAULT CONFIG:
MADE ME DIE MANY TIMES.. I WAS WALKING IN CIRCLES AND KICKING THINGS – CAN SOMEONE WHO INVITED THIS DESCRIBE HOW TO PROPERLY USE? DONT BE SO SURE THAT EVERYONE IS A GENIUS.. TOOK ME TWO DAYS TO FIGURE OUT!!!
ANYWAY..THE QCONF UTILITY IS NOT ABLE TO CHANGE PARAMETER „SET_PWM“ I NEED!!! (DEPENDENT ONLY ON x86?) MANUAL EDIT = DEFCONFIG USED – THE EXACT DEFAULT I DONT WANT!!! WHO DA F.. INVITED THIS WAY.. WHY CANT I FORCE MY SETTINGS IN SOME COMMAND LINE UTILITY? I CANNOT DO „–force“ ON A GRAPHIC PROGRAM!!!
ITS NOT ONLY ON QCONF, GCONF (SHARE SOME PARTS OF CODE WITH QCONF) DOES FAIL THE SAME.. I CLICK ON CHECKED BOX AND NOTHING!!! I WOULD KILL THE MOUSE AND PUNCH THE KEYBOARD!!!
ONLY PARAMETER I WAS ABLE TO SET WAS THE „CONFIG_PWM_CRC“ TO „n“ WHICH WAS A PART OF THE ANSWER THAT GUY WROTE ABOVE.. WEIRD THING IS THAT THE QCONF SAVED „CONFIG_PWM_CRC is not set“ BEING DIFFERENT FROM EXPECTED BOOL „=n“
ANYWAY COMPILATION WENT FINE, MY CONFIG WAS USED, BUT THE HAZY FONT PROBLEM PERSISTS.. I TRIED MY KERNEL ON LIVE SYSTEM STARTED FROM USB THUMBDRIVE BUT AS I ALREADY WROTE –WITH NO LUCK–
BOOTING:
ANOTHER HARD TIME WAS TO MAKE THE INSTALLED ANDROID x86 START..
TRIAL AND ERROR LED ME TO THIS CONFIG OF „/etc/grub.d/40_custom“
here it is:
„#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the ‚exec tail‘ line above.
menuentry „Android-x86 4.4-r3″ –class android –class gnu-linux –class gnu –class os {
set root=’hd0,6′
search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set=root –hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 –hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 –hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 a27caed0-afef-4e3a-a7af-437d0c92b218
linux /android-4.4-r3/kernel root=UUID=a27caed0-afef-4e3a-a7af-437d0c92b218 quiet androidboot.hardware=generic_x86 SRC=/android-4.4-r3 acpi_sleep=s3_bios,s3_mode
initrd /android-4.4-r3/initrd.img
}“
After adding this(you must edit ‚hd0,6‘ and UUID properly) run terminal as root and do „update-grub“ notice that it doesnt find ANDROID but it will be there at system boot..
CONCLUSION:
DEBIAN 8 IS QUITE FINE FOR DAILY USE..
BUT ANDROID’S HAZY FONT ISSUE IS WAY TOO DIFFICULT / IMPOSSIBLE TO SOLVE AS IT TOOK FEW DAYS AND NO LUCK..
..SO I WILL JUST WAIT FOR NEW KERNEL / MESA / ANDROID x86 VERSION..