A500 Public Recovery

This document is building instructions to build your own copy of the A500 Public Recovery (Based on Clock Work Mod recovery)

This recovery is intended for use with the A500 (and possibly in future other Acer tablets)

Overview of the build environment

The build environment for building the A500 Public Recovery is a snapshot of the CM9 source tree plus a few modified projects

The modified projects are as follows:

bootable/recovery @@ https://github.com/ezterry/AcerRecovery/tree/APR_recovery
device/acer/picasso @@ https://github.com/ezterry/AcerRecovery/tree/picasso_device
external/busybox @@ https://github.com/ezterry/AcerRecovery/tree/external_busybox
system/core @@ https://github.com/ezterry/AcerRecovery/tree/system_core

(It ought to be noted most modifications are in the device tree and the CWM bootable/recovery tree)

To aid in both fetching the CM9 snapshot and grabbing the above packages a combination of repo and a support script is used

System Requirements

Android build trees are best supported on Linux, personally I am using Debian squeeze however many other distros have been successfully used.

The following is from the CMWiki build requirements:

Install using the package manager of your choice:

For 32-bit & 64-bit systems:

git-core gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools build-essential zip curl libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev sun-java6-jdk pngcrush schedtool

For 64-bit only systems:

g++-multilib lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32readline5-dev gcc-4.3-multilib g++-4.3-multilib
   NOTE: gcc-4.3-multilib g++-4.3-multilib is no longer available for Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit, but should still build without issue. 
NOTE: On Ubuntu 10.10, and variants, you need to enable the parter repository to install sun-java6-jdk:
   add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ maverick partner" 

** Original text from http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Nexus_One:_Compile_CyanogenMod_%28Linux%29

Initial Fetch of the Source Code

run the following commands from a new empty directory on your computer (example: mkdir ~/acer_recovery cd ~/acer_recovery)

repo init -u https://github.com/ezterry/AcerRecovery.git -b recovery_manifest 
repo sync -j 10
./android/extract_local

Note: you will need aprox 10GB of free space for the full build tree

Building the recovery

once you have fetched the files build from the same directory as you ran repo init from (example: cd ~/acer_recovery)

. build/envsetup.sh
lunch full_picasso-eng
make -j4 recoveryimage

you should now find the compiled recovery at out/target/product/picasso/recovery.img

Syncing with github

If you want to fetch my most recent changes run the following:

repo sync -j 10
./android/extract_local

Changing the code

To change the code it is recommended to start a new branch in the related git repository

To make a new branch "mytesting" in say bootable/recovery do the following

cd bootable/recovery
git branch mytesting
git checkout mytesting

then you can use normal git commands in this new branch or publish a mirror online

All modifications of the code base will be benefited by using the git revision control system

Thanks and Credits

Koush - for clockwork mod recovery (he did the hard work)
Vash - various insight into the device
Skrilax_CZ - for the unlocked bootloader
many others on XDA for insight into the kernel modifcations required