I got a g1 for Fathers’ Day (Thanks Hannah!) and I’ve been futzing with it a bit. I rooted it and set up a chroot debian system. It’s running an ssh server, openvpn and snmpd.

There’s been a lot of talk about getting flash working on the device. They just announced yesterday the next phone by HTC (the folks who make the hardware) which runs the Android OS. It sounds like there will be a ‘lite’ version of Adobe Flash available for that model. With all the natter about the new phone and flash, I thought it might be fun to get Mono running on the current model and see if I can get a Moonlight plugin shoe-horned in to the browser.

I got quite a bit of help from #android on freenode and #mono on gimpnet when I brought the topic up. At this point, I don’t think I can make it look native, but perhaps just getting the project off the ground is enough to start interest.

At a low level, it looks like the phone can manipulate the graphic display by blitting RGB565 pixmaps to the fbdev. This might be enough to put together a quick cairo back-end. Since moonlight draws to cairo, something like this would be required in order to get things moving.

Now to see if I can compile mono + moonlight in such a way that it’s tiny enough to not take up the whole flash….