Project:Android

The mobile devices today become more powerful than desktop computers 10 years ago. As the hardware performance boosts, the software becomes a flexible part of the system. The pursuit of software freedom on desktop computers carries naturally to mobile computing.

The Free Software Foundation has recognized the freedom for mobile computing early on. With a GPL-licensed Linux kernel and a Apache-licensed userland, Android is a big step forward for the smartphones, tablets and multimedia centers. At the same time, as the free software foundation points out, there is still a long way to go to regain the full control of our own device.

Vendors have put effort to make their source code open source. However, it is rather challenging to figure out exactly how to build from the source a usable system. Linux kernels have patches from vendors that should be tracked. The proprietary binary blobs to drive certain hardware should be carefully analyzed and documented. The bootloaders and flashing tools vary across vendors and impose artificial restrictions for profit reasons.

Project cyanogenmod is another step forward in that its build system, finely version controlled, tracks the details need to build a working system. The development cycle of cyanogenmod is to cross compile, flash the image and test. With a advancement of the mobile computing power, native compiling right on the device becomes feasible.

The point of native compiling in-situ is that it makes development more direct and easier. With the help of an additional GNU userland, the development and test on the mobile device will be no different from developing desktop computers applications: our phone becomes more hackable and more enjoyable to tweak with.

Gentoo is exactly good at managing building recipes with utmost clarity and elegance by its portage/ebuild system. Ebuilds are the most suitable installation documentations that are able to be executed and verified to work. Gentoo has the potential to make the native development environment for mobile devices a reality.

This project is about to bring Gentoo users and develops home to their mobile devices. It aims to produce an environment that is indifferent to that on desktop computers. It strives to liberate the computers in our pocket with Gentoo philosophy and style, as an ultimate response to free software foundation's concerns on the freedom for mobile computing.

Installation
You can either install by the precompiled stage3 tarball or, if brave enough, by building the Gentoo RAP manually.

Compatibility
The device list records all the device test results.