We’re looking to expand our development team beyond it’s current numbers, in an effort to spread the workload out and gain some fresh perspective and insight.

If you think you have something to bring to the project, have some skill in Java, C, or other areas you think are important, and are willing to put time into the project, please let us know via Email and/or freenode IRC in #droidmod.

I have just been informed that the person who had control of Alldroid.org’s hosting package at Slicehost has canceled the account.

It is too early to tell if there are backups of anything important, but it seems that all data is irretrievably lost.

I would like to extend a hand out to those who are displaced, and let you know that you are welcome here.

It stings, knowing that all record of the past 6 months of my life on Alldroid are lost, that it’s gone, that it won’t be back.

Hopefully we as a community can band together and overcome this loss.

sgx

We’re still looking to get an I/O ticket for trevorj, so anyone who’s willing to sell or knows someone selling theirs please contact either him or myself via email (one_of_our_usernames@droidmod.org). Either full shot or academic, doesn’t really matter.

We didn’t find out till a few days after the registration was filled that his schedule allowed it, and everyone expected it to be open for a bit longer anyways, but these things happen.

We’re only interested in the ticket, not the surprise gift phone, so you effectively get a free phone, and maybe even a bit more cash in your pocket than you started with

All offers will be considered.

Thanks for all your continued support,

sgx, on behalf of trevorj and the DroidMod team

EDIT: Trevorj  has a ticket now, and we’re booked for I/O. Now for the hard part, waiting for the 18th so we can fly out…

An unofficial from-source engineering snapshot of Project Durden was dropped in IRC a few hours ago, and aside from wifi not working due to a missing driver and launcher2 freaking because of landscape, it’s apparently working good.

No direct support will be given, as this is an unofficial snapshot, but members of the community can most likely help you out if you do need it.

Webkit and superuser are from the Cyanogen repository, and our vendor overlay is based on Koush’s. You can browse the manifest in our repo at git.droiddev.org. This is only the beginning of whats to come, we are looking forward to working with as many teams and people as possible to create something really great.

The snapshot is an update.zip format file with an md5sum of 62a5a149a354a9da30d5abbd3a845083 please verify this before instalation for some peace of mind. Data and cache will need to be wiped before install.

Let me stress again that this is not a fully finished release, or even an alpha or beta. It’s a snapshot of what we’re doing that we felt we should let out. It’s plain vanilla.

sgx, speaking on behalf of the DM team

EDIT: A wififix.zip that cures the wifi issue has been dropped on irc, md5sum of 7d3720320bd3e1a955175c0e91a6b0d7

I’ll be performing some miscelaneous updates/upgrades to the underlying systems on git.droiddev.org today. (mainly updating to latest version of git/gitweb and adding mirroring to github)

I’ll try to keep impact minimal, but be advised that clones might fail randomly throughout the day.

Snapshots will still be downloadable via the gitweb interface.

sgx

EDIT: updated to git/gitweb version 1.7.0.4 from 1.5.6.5 (damn Debian takes FOREVER to update to the latest packages… sid FTW!) next stop gitosis…

http://www.mediafire.com/?jgt1gjgx5gv

[mbm] was kind enough to provide this.

That should help people going from stock ESE81 OTA 2.1 get a root friendly recovery. No more downgrade, root, apply zip, install update fun.

Just flash that, and you will have the latest SPRecovery version installed.

Please note that this WILL reflash the boot image to stock ESE81! This is required to keep recovery from being overwrote on reboot. A few bits in the boot image were changed to break the checksum hash that the recovery update checks.

The md5sum of the image is:

9b6a336cd8f067d4487935468c758d89  SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf

PLEASE VERIFY THIS HASH! This is the ONLY way to verify that you have the correct image!

Linux users can run “md5sum SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf” in the folder you downloaded to

Windows users can download md5sum.exe from http://etree.org/md5com.html

Place md5sum.exe in c:\windows\system32 to get it into your path

syntax is the same as for linux

As always, we are not responsible for user errors, and it’s your responsibility to obtain any other tools that you may need.

For those that would like a step-by-step guide, please follow this link.

Following on the heals of trevorj’s post, I’m going to give everyone a bit more info on our Windows CE prank, and the background of it.

First off, we really could have done CE, since TI has a nice SDK  for the Omap processor available at their site. It’s not the direction we are going however, because quite frankly WinCE makes me wince.

Secondly, the domain was an accidental thing (don’t ever ever ever renew domains when you’re running on 30 minutes of sleep…). I had jokingly priced it back in February, and it stayed in my shopping cart till I renewed 2 other domains. This was my out of pocket expense, and the $8.88 for a year was well worth it for the sheer shenanigans factor.

Third, all credit for the logo goes to Vlcn, who is an absolute wizard.

The idea to play the prank was mine, so I am to blame, Trev decided on WinCE and was a good sport agreeing to be the brunt of it, and Vlcn kindly agreed to do up the mock logo on short notice.

On behalf of everyone here, happy April fools!

Sorry if it seems like we’re “not doing anything”, but we set high standards on our work for you guys [and ourselves!]

The engineering release of ESE53 is bit of a scenario for us. We could hurry up and throw something together, or we could work hard at what we were already working on. We decided that if/when we get a sanctioned OTA 2.1 release we will look into it more thoroughly for 1.x. Till then, we are keeping ourselves out of grey area of copying/pasting/illegal/warez/crap, and are working toward doing some great things.

[Edit by trevorj:] We edited the original post a bit to better reflect what we meant, a bit was being taken out of context . We are working very hard on the next major, and we plan on it being straight up liquified awesome. Mmm. We just don’t find interest in rushedly yanking some build’s files and hurrying to get something out there. We played that game, and it only leads to a rushed result. Thats not where the fun is. And, we go where the fun is. After all, we are doing this merely because it’s fun and we enjoy it! And we think it’s fantastic that others do, too. A big thanks to everyone who uses the ROM, it’s only the tip of what it’s becoming!

We bounced back from a crippling nutshot when the sholes.info server went down, which was no small ordeal! We are indebted to the good folks at Beyond Hosting for helping us get our primary website up within a matter of hours, and to the people who sunk their time and effort into getting the main page infrastructure for it set up in that time.
Try bringing up an entire site in under 24 hours, it’s not fun. BIG thanks to BeyondHosting for their help!

We also re-pushed SM/DMupdater, which was a task in itself. I still don’t know how that got finished as quick as it did. Camel deserves a big round of applause for his hard work and dedication.

We then released DM1.0, which in our small opinion, has been the most stable ROM we’ve experienced for the Droid. We’d hate to follow up what we feel is such a good release with anything less, so we’ve been taking our time. By the looks of it, we’ll be releasing minor revisions to 1.x in the interim while we get some liquified awesome going.

Getting the repositories back online was the next step, and Aschen Networks graciously provided VPS space at a moments notice. Provisioning the VPS, securing it, getting git setup, and recovering the scattered repositories and importing the old code proved to be a bit larger task then we had hoped! But, we are glad it’s nice and done. Sgx was a huge, huge, help in all of this, he’s been a great addition to the team.

Forums were being setup as well, more work was being done on the repository server, mainly getting gitweb and git-daemon properly installed so that people could browse the source repositories, and we could more easily view changes as they were applied. Again, sgx is the man.

About this time we started importing and testing the latest 2.6.29 kernel release from AOSP, in an effort to keep the innovation moving. This consisted of a review by Trevorj and myself of hundreds of commits from AOSP, TI, and the mainline Kernel.org trees. We have been in-house testing new boot images, as well as updating the mkrom tools to work properly with git. If you compiled any of the old sholes kernels, we highly recommend you take a look. Just remember to set CROSS_COMPILE. I know we’ve loved it so far!

The engineering testing release of ESE53 dropped soon after, causing quite a stir. The general consensus was to wait for the official OTA, since the person who leaked it hinted at a binary watermark being included. Better safe than sorry. Plus, we’d rather work on the fun stuff than simply copy files and re-release something that barely has anything different than our current release does already, to be honest..

Since then, we’ve put up the wiki at droiddev.org, which will soon have dev information, instructions for using the tools and repositories, and information pertaining to the rom image format we have pioneered.

SirPsychoS has pushed the SP recovery source to the repository server sometime last week(forgive me for forgetting the date), and has been working on fixing the makefiles and dependencies. He has also retooled mkrom to use fakeroot, and made some other enhancements. Go SPS!

Bugzilla was just deployed to handle any user problems relating to our release, and this seems to have caught some flack. Let me state that having bug tracking is a pivotal part of a solid and stable release system. We love feedback on what is broken, and a forum is just not the right tool for that. Our Bugzilla installation automatically informs the proper parties when a bug is entered, keeps the various bugs in an easy to navigate format, and makes sure that everyone is informed along the way. No longer will your valuable user input be hidden under 30 posts about lolcats and earwigs. It’s great for everyone! Many thanks to trevorj for setting this up.

We decided that we’d rather get our infrastructure fully operational before we could get more out, because a solid foundation makes for a solid project, an awesome community, and awesome releases.

To all those who have supported us during this bumpy transition, we thank you. It’s great to know that people can see through the fog and realize that we do this because we enjoy it, because it’s interesting, and because it furthers the community as a whole in doing what we all want to do: make the Droid better in every way imaginable.

sgx [and the rest of the DroidMod team!]

If we have forgotten anyone or anything important, please let us know.

We are currently in the middle of upgrading the VPS account that git.droiddev.org is hosted on, in part because we underestimated our requirements when we initially set it up (git clones currently hit the ram limit), and partly in anticipation of some upcoming behind the scenes automation work related to Project Durden.

During this time there will most likely be some sporadic outages on the repository server.

We expect this transition to be complete by monday.

This upgrade will not affect the main site, the forums, or the wiki, as they are hosted on a separate server.

sgx, signing off!

EDIT: The upgrade is currently complete, so git should be fully functional once more. If you still have issues please contact us in #droiddev on freenode.

EDIT2: I have a forum post here that might help people understand more about what’s been going on, why we’re using git, etc.