Team DRH Design Contest

Details

Category: Development News

Published on Wednesday, 02 May 2012 01:36

Written by The3DmaN

is giving you the chance to have your art work used in our ROM!

What we are looking for:
- A badass boot animation
- Another boot animation for our installer (preferably just as bad ass)
- A Default Wallpaper (Even more badass)

Contest Rules:
(We will run the contest until our next release is ready, and judge the entries and include the winners in the ROM.)

- Both boot animations must include our team name and web address, and be split up into sequential numbered images (unless you would like to make the bootanimation.zp if you know how)
- The wallpaper will need to include the team name
- Boot animation size must be 650x370
- Installer boot animation size can be any size up to 1024x600 (keep in mind the larger the size the longer it will take the installer to load, so this will be figured into our decision)
- Wallpaper... Here is a template for the gimp: http://www.the3dman....er_template.xcf (The top and bottom boxes will not be displayed but should be filled with the same background as the rest of your image, and the side boxes are only displayed when wallpaper scrolling is on)

Prizes:
$20 will be awarded to the maker of the best boot animation (via PayPal)
$10 will be awarded to the maker of the best installer boot animation (via PayPal)
$5 will be awarded to the maker of the best wallpaper (via PayPal), however we also may include the top 5 in the ROM (Only one prize winner though)

All entries are to be submitted to: team at teamdrh dot com

Only one prize per category however all three prizes can be won by a single person.

All winners will have their work and name (real or screename) featured on the Team DRH website also.

Lets see some nice submissions! 

Bad Blocks and the G-Tablet

Details

Category: Development News

Published on Saturday, 28 April 2012 19:57

Written by The3DmaN

So you have bad blocks and are having trouble running the ICS Rom? Here is why:

What is a bad block?:

A bad block is a sector on a flash memory disk that cannot be used due to permanent damage (or an OS inability to successfully access it). Sometimes sectors get stuck in a digital state that cannot be reversed. Failed flash memory transistors can be a cause. It is usually detected by a disk utility software on Unix-like systems. When found, these programs may mark the sectors unusable (all file systems contain provisions for bad-sector marks) and the operating system skips them in the future.

Will this cause a problem with my G-Tablet?:

Yes and No. Normally a few small bad blocks in the nand will not cause an issue, but get to many bad blocks and this takes away space that is needed for the system to properly function.

Could this be causing me to boot loop when I flash ICS?:

The bad blocks can make installing a large rom like ICS very difficult. Basically ICS really pushes the size limits of our system partition as it is, so when you have bad blocks that makes your system partition even smaller than normal, and if it gets too small because of many bad blocks it can cause the hang at the birds because the installer is trying to flash more data to the system partition than your tablet can hold so it corrupts some of the data being flashed and or data that is already present and causes the hang. I found this out with earlier versions of our rom because I have bad blocks on my G-Tablet also.

Can I repair bad blocks?:

No. Bad blocks are currently un-repairable once they go bad they stay bad.

So why have I been told to flash to stock to repair bad blocks then?:

Flashing to stock does not repair bad blocks, but what it does do is it forces the system to recognize and flag the bad blocks, so the system does not try so store data to those areas.

So is there a chance that I will never be able to run ICS?:

While rare, this is a possibility depending on how many bad blocks you actually have and where in the nand. ICS is a large OS compared to older versions of Android, and it pushes the limits of our G-Tablet. We are trying to keep the Rom as small as possible without loosing functionality just for this reason, but there is only so much we can do.

How can I tell if I have bad blocks?:

Running dmesg in terminal emulator will show you a log and in the log it will tell you if you have bad blocks. You can also pull a logcat via ADB.

If you have bad blocks, this is similar to what you will see in terminal emulator after running the dmesg command (this is from my G-Tablet):

1. <7>[    3.381561] yaffs: Attempting MTD mount of 31.3,"mtdblock3"
2. <7>[    3.395419] yaffs: block 324 is bad
3. <7>[    3.396054] yaffs: block 338 is bad
4. <7>[    3.421303] yaffs: block 979 is bad
5. <7>[    3.422226] yaffs: block 999 is bad
6. <7>[    3.428016] yaffs: block 1145 is bad
7. <7>[    3.440420] yaffs: block 1460 is bad
8. <7>[    3.440601] yaffs: block 1461 is bad
9. <7>[    3.450985] yaffs: block 1723 is bad
10. <7>[    3.468428] yaffs: block 2144 is bad
11. <7>[    3.468549] yaffs: block 2145 is bad
12. <7>[    3.476188] yaffs: block 2322 is bad
13. <7>[    8.027378] yaffs: yaffs_read_super: is_checkpointed 0
14. <6>[    8.072853] yaffs: dev is 32505860 name is "mtdblock4" rw
15. <6>[    8.072945] yaffs: passed flags ""
16. <7>[    8.073040] yaffs: Attempting MTD mount of 31.4,"mtdblock4"
17. <7>[    8.088393] yaffs: block 350 is bad
18. <7>[    8.091995] yaffs: block 432 is bad
19. <7>[    8.095155] yaffs: block 504 is bad

Beta 1.2 and other news.

Details

Category: Development News

Published on Thursday, 19 April 2012 16:43

Written by ch3vr0n5

Hey all.

I had intended this to be a longer update but unfortunately the post got erased before I could submit it so here is the short version.

1.2 is live. It does have the multitouch bug fix as well as a few others. Anyone with the CPU frequency bug should full wipe when installing this one so dont try to flash on top 1.1.

Cpu governors and IO schedulers had to be removed but expect them back for 1.3.

We are currently experimenting with moving from kernel version 2.6.39 to 3.1 so bare with us as our updates start to roll out a little slower.

If you have any questions Im sure you all have my email by now orjust hit up the team on the slatedroid forums  

As always, Cheers!

Ch3vr0n5

GApps 8.3

Details

Category: Development News

Published on Wednesday, 18 April 2012 03:00

Written by The3DmaN

The GApps have been updated!

Updated GApps: 
-Fixed GenieWidget
-Updated Google Currents
-Updated Google Plus
-Changed some lines in the installer script.

GAppZ Download

* Thanks to JUGOMAN on SD for noticing that I forgot to update this page. :-)