SlateKit Base for Nexus 7 (2013) Released

SlateKit is a drop-in replacement of Android UI stack, to help makers building custom tablet UI, by using Qt/QML, JavaScript and Chromium.

Today we announce the first technical preview of SlateKit Base for Nexus 7 (2013), the platform-specific port, alone with other UI components like SlateKit Shell, LockScreen and Keyboard.

Prerequisite

• Nexus 7 “razor” [2013] (WiFi)
• Android 4.4.2 (KOT49H)
• rooted and adb shell access

Installation

1. Download the image: slatekit-flo-0423.zip (146.7 MB)
2. Unzip files to /data, make sure busybox has executable permission
3. Start the UI by: ./chroot.sh

Technical details

SlateKit Base essentially consists:

• a minimal Ubuntu root filesystem (Trusty/armhf)
• Qt 5.2.1 and Oxide 1.0 (Chromium content API wrapper)
• libhybris for hardware accelerated graphics
• hwcomposer QPA from Mer project

What's next?

Theoretically this rootfs works for all Android 4.4 system with HW composer 1.1/1.2, so I'll try to enable it on other SoC and make an installer.

If you find this interesting or useful, welcome to join the project on Github, and ping me on Twitter @penk or penkia@gmail.com.

Happy Hacking!
penk