Androidified

I picked up a Motorola Xoom tablet on February 24th, the day of its release. To start with, the Xoom is equipped with a Dual-Core ARM Cortex A9 processor called the Nvidia Tegra 2. The Xoom runs Android 3.0, Honeycomb. There are no third party UI replacements or additions. The Xoom runs pure Android 3.0 and it is very fast.

 One of the nice things that you can do is customize the keyboard. For a 10 inch tablet, it is convenient to be able to type with your left and right thumbs and Thumb Keyboard is available on the Android Marketplace just for this.

 Thumb Keyboard greatly speeds up typing on the Xoom

 Next, let's build a statically linked Busybox binary so that you can do something useful with the device.

# wget http://busybox.net/downloads/busybox-1.18.3.tar.bz2
# wget http://www.busybox.net/downloads/busybox-1.18.3.tar.bz2.sign
# http://busybox.net/~vda/vda_pubkey.gpg
# gpg --check-sigs vda.linux
# gpg --verify busybox-1.18.3.tar.bz2.sign
# sha1sum busybox-1.18.3.tar.bz2
# md5sum busybox-1.18.3.tar.bz2
# bzip2 -cd busybox-1.18.3.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
# cd busybox-1.18.3

# make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- defconfig
# make CFLAGS=--static LDFLAGS=--static ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-
# adb remount
# adb push busybox /system/xbin/busybox
# adb shell chmod 0755 /system/xbin/busybox
# adb shell
# cd /system/xbin
# ./busybox --install -s /system/xbin
# cd /mnt/sdcard
# echo "export PATH="export PATH=/system/xbin:/sbin:/vendor/bin:/system/sbin:\
  /system/bin" > profile
# echo "ENV=/mnt/sdcard/profile /system/xbin/ash" > /system/bin/alsh
# chmod 0755 /system/bin/alsh
# alsh
# uname -ia
# Linux localhost 2.6.36.3-g2a65edc #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Feb 7 15:24:33 PST 2011
  armv7l GNU/Linux

Now, whenever you adb into your device, you can just run alsh to drop into the ash shell.

 "Now I want an Android device so that I can Androidy it" - KLK