Mobile Internet World was tiny!

I swung by the Yankee Group's Mobile Internet World show in Boston yesterday to check out what was going on. Google's Rich Miner, the head of the Android effort, was doing a Q&A at 2 pm, so I figured I'd see what folks were asking him and check out the vendors on the show floor.

The show was tiny! Boston has two convention centers and when I arrived at the BCEC, things were so quiet that I was worried I was at the wrong one. I eventually wended my way to the back corner where the show was being held and found the show floor. There were only a couple of dozen vendors present and only three of those had anything other than the tiny pipe and drape style displays. I bumped into Derek Speed who I knew from Digital Semiconductor showing off the Moblin SDK for Intel, which was fun, but other than that it was pretty disappointing.

There were perhaps 80-100 people at the Google Q&A (or about 25-30% of the turnout that they had for their developer day in Cambridge last year). In addition to Rich Miner, they also had Justin Mattson from their developer program there to answer questions.

Nothing earthshaking was revealed in the Q&A. Rich said that the early reviews from the media were at the high end of the range of what he thought was possible. He was also pleased with the T-Mobile pre-sales. As for futures, he thought they could do a better job with integrated search (phone + web) and multi-modal search (voice), but didn't say anything about when/if that would be improved.

One thing that I missed before was that the App Market popularity would be computed on both downloads and usage, so they must be uploading usage stats. Rich said there was no plan to expand the app market to content types other than apps because it wasn't a profit center for them.

If they have the show again, I'll definitely look more carefully at the exhibitors list before deciding whether it's worth even an hour or two.

Building Google's Android on 64-bit Linux

This week Google released the sources for all the open-source components of Android including the kernel, the frameworks, the SDK, and most, but not all, of the bundled apps.

My laptop is a dual boot system that mostly runs Windows, but Linux and OS X are the only supported Android build environments, so I fired up Linux (64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron). Things don't quite build out of the box for 64-bit Linux, so here are some tips to get you going.

In addition to the dependencies listed at http://source.android.com/download#TOC-Linux you'll also need the following:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs g++-multilib gcc-multilib lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev

There's an additional problem with a missing softlink to the 32-bit version of the X11 client library that you can resolve as follows:

$ cd /usr/lib32
$ sudo ln -s libX11.so.6 libX11.so

It really ought to be included in one of the standard packages, but doesn't seem to be on Ubunto (the shared library itself is included in ia32-libs however).

Follow the rest of the directions on the Android site to install their repo tool (and git if you don't have it), fetch sources, and then do

$ cd ~/mydroid (or wherever you put things)
$ make sdk

to build your own shiny version of Android from scratch. This took over an hour on my laptop, so be patient. When it's finished, you should be able to change to the results directory and running the freshly built emulator

$ cd out/host/linux-x86/sdk/android-sdk_eng._linux-x86
$ tools/emulator

You should see an Android emulator window pop up on your screen running your freshly built code.