Archos Gen8 is busy making more chanages, but still no Gingerbread

Version 2.1.8 – February 16th, 2011

• External keyboard layouts: various country layouts are now supported using Settings > Language and keyboard > Select external keyboard layout setting (qwerty us/uk, azerty french, qwertz deutch, latin america spanish, russian, japanese).
• Proxy: http proxy settings have been enabled for the browser in Settings > Wireless & network > wifi proxy settings.
• Network shares: introduce an option to enable/disable network share scanning per Wi-Fi Access Point in Wi-Fi authentication dialog box
• Battery: improve robustness of battery charge status for hard drive based A70it
• Sound: fix sound level saturation causing loss of audio when playing on speaker
• Music: fix some MP3 files have bad sound after seeking
• Video: make some high level H264 HD files play correctly
• Video: fix black screen on video player resume from suspend for MPEG4 files
• USB host: fix NTFS UTF8 support
• Wi-Fi: fix network disabled occurring after several suspend/resume loops
• Wi-Fi: prevent false state information reported when authenticating/enabling Wi-Fi
• Multimedia library: avoid deletion of multimedia files happening sometimes on SDCard

Download firmware here (from Archos.com)

Releases notes from http://update.archos.com/8/gen8/changes_firmware_archos_android_gen8.htm

New Archos Firmware 2.1.3 for Gen8

Version 2.1.3 is replacing version 2.1.2 due with loop bug

• Video: fix some audio glitches after seeking WMA files
• Video: add support for MTS files
• Video: bring UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded subtitles format support
• Video: fix SUB subtitles sometimes truncated
• Video: add IDX/SUB subtitle handling
• Video: fix http://.*mpeg playback
• Video: support resume and bookmark for network shares
• Video: fix some FLV files not playing
• Youtube: fix mobile site video not playing
• Multimedia: fix RTSP support for Android applications
• Multimedia: fix some web radio applications by adding basic M3U support
• Audio: apply shorter steps in audio balance tuning
• Audio: fix sound glitch on system notification while playing music
• Music browser: fix album view crash on scroll with a lot of albums
• Music: support samba protected directory access
• Thumbnails: resolve thumbs generation freeze
• Indexing: improve rescan robustness
• Indexing: fix scanning not restarting after connecting device on PC or ejecting SDCard
• Network shares: large files (>2GB) can now be played
• Wi-Fi: fix disabling power saving not working
• Wi-Fi: enable IEEE802.11n support
• Wi-Fi: achieve faster reconnection
• SDCard: fix sdcard removal not being taken into account
• Storage: enable EXT3 filesystem support and migration
• USB keyboard: fix external directional keys layout when rotating the device
• Memory: enable 32MB swap by default and increase it to 64MB after Android reset or full device reformat
• Applications: fix applications disappearing sometimes between reboots
• Applications: fix unit not responsive after Google voicesearch use
• Power management: allow to define deep sleep mode by default in settings/about device/power management
• VPN: PPTP VPN support has been fixed

Archos Gen8 Kernel with Root and Overclock option

Happy new year everyone!

There is new life to Archos device using the new SDE (Special developer Edition) Development have open up the MOD community. I will be testing there kernel and post some feedback and benchmark result. Happy Rooting. :)

Your can download the SDE through Archos website
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates.html

There are three different various of Kernel on development, and there will be more to come.

• dogmaphobia kernel: Not overclock, no EXT4 support
• $aur0n kernel: Not overclocked, EXT4 is supported
• ardatdat kernel: Overclocked, EXT4 is supported

dogmaphobia Method - root only
================
1) Boot into SDE
2) Flash initramfs by dogmaphobia ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=880321 ) and my kernel (or any other kernel)
3) Reboot -> SDE -> Developer Edition
4) This is rooted, but not perm root, you need to add/remove apps every restart

$aur0n Method - rooted, boot from SD
=========================
1) Boot into SDE
2) Flash initramfs by $aur0n ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=895599 ) and (or other kernel that support EXT4)
3) Reboot -> SDE -> Developer Edition
4) Boot from SD card, because EXT4 file system is used, so it is fast and all contents are stored on SD card so that it is perm root with unlimited /data/ storage

ardatdat Method - rooted, overclockable, boot from SD
=========================
1) Boot into SDE
2) Flash initramfs by ardatdat ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=897877 ) and (or other kernel that support EXT4)
3) Reboot -> SDE -> Developer Edition
4) Boot from SD card, because EXT4 file system is used, so it is fast and all contents are stored on SD card so that it is perm root with unlimited /data/ storage

Change Log for ardatdat (2011-01-06)
- EXT4 fix (Quadrant score ~ 2500)
- Stable at max frequency 1200Mhz and min frequency 250Mhz (thanks Tzbob)
- Selectable frequency using SetCPU: 250/300/1000/1152/1200 Mhz
- 2.6.31 scheduling tweaks
- Source code pushed to github.com for easy sharing and conforming to GNU public license
- Merge various commits ( details can be seen in my github: https://github.com/ardatdat/archos-kernel/ )
- Quadrant scoring 2808 using 1200Mhz and boot from SD (Sandisk 8G Class 4)

Source: XDA via ardatdat