finally figured out what was trippin me up on setting up a build environment. doing a bunch of downloading right now and then hopefully running my first build tomorrow! ;-) i guess i will find out first-hand if gingerbread will compile on my 32bit! ive read a lot of info saying "yes", and the same amount saying no... so id say ive got a 50/50 shot! lol! but now that i have the knowledge i need to build, if it fails on my machine, i might take u up on a remote session, although u would need to be running some form of ubuntu first. also, there would be a LOT of downloading and a LOT of building time, so ur computer would prob b tied up for somewhere around 12 hours total im guessing. hopefully it just builds on my machine with no issues!
also, ive been diving head-first into all of the coding of the source, just out of pure curiousity and hunger to learn about the system. i stumbled across some things in the source that make me believe that this IS our source (fingers still crossed tho, haha). as im sure most of u are already aware of, i had a HELL of a time getting the splash screen figured out to produce an undistorted custom splash. in a nutshell, the solution was to take our resolution (240x320), and tack on an extra 16 pixels to the width making it 256x320. any other way would produce a distorted splash. so, my understanding is that (and plz, anyone who knows a lot about FB's, correct me if i am mistaken...) the framebuffer used at boot (fb0) takes a raw file, converts it to rgb565 rle file format, and pushes it to the framebuffer at double its original size (240x320 would render to 480x640). so, with that in mind.... take my modified working width of 256, and subtract the stock screen width of 240, and u are left with a remainder of 16 pixels. so, since the FB multiplies the input image by 2, that remainder of 16 pixels now becomes 32. now, take a look at this note that i found while digging around in the coding of the framebuffer:
/* The adreno GPU hardware requires that the pitch be aligned to 32 pixels for color buffers, so for the cases where the GPU is writing directly to fb0, the framebuffer pitch also needs to be 32 pixel aligned */
hmmmm.... sounds pretty similar to me! so, im thinking that since the splash issue seemed to be a very uncommon problem, the fact that i found that note within the source of the FB leads me to believe that this source should work for us. like ive mentioned before, im new to this process, so i dont wanna set any of this info in stone til i have a working build from source, but id say its lookin pretty good, y'all!
***also, if anyone else has any input on the subject of source, custom kernels, porting, etc... please open up dialouge within this thread! id love to see this thread turn into a huge dev project for the Venture! any relative information is welcome guys!!***
so, im kinda stuck with 3 32 bit systems at the moment.