Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Android Considerations
There a few things you must be aware of before you decide to use Android on your Raspberry Pi. The first and biggest
one is that there is no support from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. There is no supported image of Android for the
Raspberry Pi and there never has been. The foundation was working on a port of Android 4 with Broadcom, but that
never got released for reasons unknown. If you think Fedora was in a bad state, then Android on the Raspberry Pi is in
an even worse state.
The second point to keep in mind is that since there is no official support from the foundation there are no
official Broadcom modules for Android. This means your GPU won't be able to help accelerate the graphics and all
rendering will be done in software and that is going to be slow. This means no Android 4 at all. You're going to be
going back to a 2.3 version to be even somewhat usable, but without GPU acceleration it's still going to be slow.
Installing Android
No matter how harsh I sound about Android, it's still a good exercise to install it. After all, it's a good idea to
know how Android works behind the scenes especially if you use an Android phone. If you still want to go
ahead and try out Android you're going to need to download an image. You can get an image from
Once you have this image downloaded, extract the 7zip image to your host machine. You're also going to need
an SD card that is bigger than 2 GB to write the image to.
Find your SD card on your host machine and use
dd
to write the image; this will take some
time to write. I used the following command to write the image to my SD card:
1.
# dd bs=4M if=Gingerbread+EthernetManager.img of=/dev/sde
If you need to edit the
config.txt
file to support your output device, insert your SD card
into the host machine and select the 80-MB-sized partition. This is the boot filesystem and
contains the firmware and configuration files. This is optional as HDMI just works for my
system.
2.
3.
Now place the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and turn on the device. At first you will see
your normal
dmesg
boot output scroll past your screen very fast. Then you will notice
it stops after activating the network card. At this point I want to warn you that the boot
process will stall for quite some time and then again while the Android interface loads.
Soon after you will see the Android logo on your screen: you're close now. If all has gone to
plan you will see the lock screen of the Android operating system. Take a look at Figure
11-1
to see the lock screen just after the boot process is finished.
