Motorola XOOM Rooted

Since it’s another Google experience device, and ships with fastboot support (albeit, limited), it really does come rooted out of the box. Just needed to figure out the board kernel base, and compile up a new kernel.

Unfortunately the kernel was not available in the Android repositories. At first, I tried using the Harmony kernel, since they are both tegra 2 250 chips. That turned out to be major fail. As soon as I was about to give up, I noticed that AOSP had updated their tegra kernel repository with some new tasty branches for stingray. Kudos to these guys for being so on the ball! I was able to compile that up and get a working recovery to obtain root, and then get Superuser on the device.

I also built up a recovery, but due to a nonfunctional SD card slot (until they release a firmware update that enables the slot), nothing really works. That will come later.

Here are the instructions to root your device (this assumes you have adb and fastboot installed on your computer):

1. # Download the XOOM root zip.
2. # Unzip the package.
3. # Put your junk in the box.
4. adb reboot bootloader (skip the next 3 steps if you have already unlocked via fastboot)
5. fastboot oem unlock
6. # wait for reboot
7. adb reboot bootloader
8. fastboot flash boot rootboot.img
9. fastboot reboot
10. # wait for reboot
11. adb remount
12. adb push su /system/bin/
13. adb shell ln –s /system/bin/su /system/xbin/su
14. adb shell chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
15. adb push Superuser.apk /system/app/

Yep, that should do it.

As I mentioned, I have a working recovery, but will not be releasing it until Google or I get the SD card working.

ROM Manager support will come as soon as that happens. But feel free to buy a Premium copy in advance.

And hit me up on Twitter @koush!

PS. Stock boot image for XOOM.

DeployFu – A .NET Platform as a Service

I’m a huge fan of AppEngine and Heroku. And though I can hack up Rails and Servlet code, I’m through and through a .NET developer. Sadly, there is no viable equivalent service for .NET.¹ So, like any software geek would do, I took up creating my own. I figured, if I wanted it, chances are, other people need it too.

After being knee deep in Erlang for three months, I have a working product. Introducing DeployFu:

I’m very happy with the progress so far, and am now porting over all my AppEngine projects to DeployFu, one of which processes around $8k a month in payments.²

Here’s a quick overview of what is available so far:

• Runs on Amazon EC2
• Automatic load balancing and elastic scaling of web applications across multiple instances
• SSL on all *.deployfu.com domains.
• SSH to your application
• ASP .NET (Mono) and Pylons³ support
• Shared MySQL database instance

Right now, during the beta, the service is completely free. Eventually, there will be a free tier and a pay as you go tier.

Sign up, try it out, and leave me some feedback on the forum!

¹ Don’t get me started on Azure. It’s impossible to figure out how much you will be billed. There is no git workflow. Management is a pain.

² A PayPal IPN endpoint and licensing service for my Android applications.

³ It actually supports Manos, Rails, and NodeJS, but the platform support for those is unsupported or incomplete.