AndroidMixer

This is bleeding-edge stuff, so please don't try it if you're new to Android system development. Android already has an excellent package manager for user apps (apk's). What I propose here is a package manager for the operating system itself.

Why? Read on, or read my blog post

Some of you who have used Debian (or Debian-like Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) might know about dpkg/apt, a framework for installing packages and keeping them up to date. dpkg maintains information about everything you have installed on the system, and apt takes care of fetching packages from the Internet and other sources. It's one of the most awesome (imho) package managers ever.

opkg is similar to dpkg -- in fact, opkg is compatible with some dpkg packages (otherwise known as deb's). The difference is that it's tiny. I have built a statically-linked version of opkg for my phone that is just 746KB. It could potentially be used to keep Android systems up to date without periodically reflashing the whole ROM.

I have cooked up an installer an example package for the adventurous fellows here who have root and would like to try. It works well on my G1, but YMMV, so be sure to backup before you start. When you have done that, head over to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1213413/android-opkg/index.htm for files and instructions. Unless you want to build opkg yourself, there's no need to read further.

If you want to do it yourself, just grab the latest code off SVN and cross-compile. I already had a full Debian-based development environment on my phone, so I didn't bother with cross-compiling. The last line generates a static build, so we end up with a self-contained binary that does not depend on any shared libraries. You might also want to edit libopkg/opkg_conf.h and change OPKG_CONF_DEFAULT_TMP_DIR_BASE to "/cache/tmp" instead of "/tmp".

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my blog

Interesting stuff, can't wait to see what you come up with.

Sent from my SGH-T959 using Tapatalk

Alright, so it's been uploaded to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1213413/android-opkg/index.htm
It works for me, but I can't stress this enough: backup!

Also, this is only the beginning. There are no packages for our phones as of now, except for my example. But that doesn't mean we couldn't make some ourselves

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This is really cool stuff, have you talked with cyanogen or any of his team about it? or are you going at it alone?

I'm going at this alone because there's not much interest at the moment, and it'd take a lot more time for it to get into CyanogenMod -- it's an extra 746KB that needs to be justified. On the other hand, I plan to build some packages in my spare time, and see if I could get more people to build their repositories using it. It's somewhat of a developer-driven tool -- if developers ship their apps/hacks/enhancements using Opkg, end-users would install Opkg.

And now for something slightly more fun... I now have a repository :D
I also wrote something up on how easy it is to make packages and publish them in repositories.

To add my repository feed, just do


Once you have done that, you can then do your familiar


To test the new package, do


To get the latest versions of everything, you'd


And to remove it, simply


... just as you'd do on Debian/Ubuntu. It's a pretty boring feed at this point, but it does simplify the process of downloading, installing, and updating.

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DEFINITELY liking this. can't wait to just be able to do the equivilent of sudo apt-get update --yes; sudo apt-get upgrade --yes; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --yes; sudo apt-get autoclean --yes.

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@ado
Get Dropbox!

Now all we need is a GUI front-end a la Cydia. Oh, and it was just tested successfully on a Hero (it works on my G1).

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So... I just packaged the latest gapps for hdpi and mdpi, full and tiny... and installed. There seems to be some problems with the latest gapps, but the installation worked alright. There are two metapackages that pull in the rest as dependencies -- gapps-full and gapps-tiny. Whether you get hdpi apps or mdpi apps depends on your preferred architectures -- the idea is that you set up your preferences once, and the rest is automatic.

Users of mdpi devices should save the following as /cache/etc/opkg/arch.conf:


Users of hdpi devices should save the following as /cache/etc/opkg/arch.conf:


You can see the current package feed at the repository. But... I would wait until the next gapps release before installing.

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If you're interested in building Opkg yourself, I have some advice for you. At any rate, it worked for at least one person, but there may be additional steps depending on your device and ROM. My experience shows that there are no problems with CM6 on a G1 :D

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how difficult would it be to get something like synaptic going?

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@ado
Get Dropbox!