Installing Honeycomb on the Advent Vega Android Tablet (Vegacomb Beta) – Part 1

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***THIS MAY NO LONGER WORK, I suggest you check over at modaco for updates around Advent Vega Vegacomb before you continue****

UPDATED – Included information on automatically installing the correct Advent Vega drivers using AUDI (The automated USB driver installer for Advent Vega, more info below)

Right then, this is not a definitive guide but this will be enough to get you updating ROMs (changing to different Android versions) on your Advent Vega. This post is specifically targeted at people who have never updated a device before and therefore I will keep the technical language to a minimum.

If you’ve never modded a device before, or updated/flashed a new ROM you may not know that this process can, with a lot of devices, render your device useless if it fails. This is called ‘bricking’ your device. Don’t worry though as the Advent Vega is designed in such a way that it is apparently impossible to ‘brick’. Essentially, if something goes wrong with the update you can just reflash which means following a simple process to revert back to the original Operating System. However, if something does go wrong I will not accept responsibility for it – whether it’s related to your Advent Vega ROM update or anything else in your life. You have been warned.

I’ll do my best to keep this post up to date but it’s always a good idea to have a poke around the information super highstreet if you’re reading an old blog post.

What you will get from this post – Once we’ve finished you’ll have a lovely shiny Honeycomb tablet that cost you less than £200 and even though the ROM (read: Operating System / Android Version) is a Beta (read: unfinished / a little buggy) you will be very pleased with it.

Your Advent Vega will have more features, including the Android Marketplace so you can install new apps. Something which you can’t currently do with the shipped Android install.

You will also have an understanding of the following;

• Restoring your Advent Vega to it’s original state
• Updating your Advent Vega ROM to one of the ‘stock’ ROMs on the manufacturers website
• How to ‘root’ your Advent Vega. This allows you to do more with it. (Superuser mode)
• How to install other flavours of Android on your Advent Vega, for example CM7 or Paul’s (modaco) R8 ROM
• What Clockwork MOD is and how to boot into recovery mode on your Advent Vega
• What ROM Manager for Android is and how to use it to update your Advent Vega Android ROM

I’ve tried to keep this series of posts as simple as possible and thanks to the very active community over at www.modaco.com you now really don’t need to know much to complete the entire process, there are some things that you need to be reasonably comfortable with before we can get underway. Here’s a list of things you should have a handle on before proceeding with the upgrade to Honeycomb on your Advent Vega;

• If you use Microsoft Windows you should know how to use the Device Manager window in Control Panel
• You should be comfortable with adding new devices, updating drivers, deleting drivers from your system.
• You should be comfortable with using a command line (CMD on Windows or Terminal on Mac) and you should know how to use the cd & dir commands (cd & ls on Mac) to move around directories in the command line. This is just incase things go off piste.

If you understand the points above it will be much easier. You’ll be surprised how easy this is anyway.

Ok, remember that what we are doing is adding an unfinished version of the Android operating system to your Advent Vega. This means that things will sometimes go wrong on your tablet, these might just be minor things or the tablet may crash or restart, or lock up completely and require you to restart it. Some of the components currently don’t work, like the WebCam, Bluetooth and the Flash player. On the plus side you will get to experience Honeycomb, still play Angry Birds and you can show off to all your mates with your early adopted Honeycomb tablet. Essentially, if you decide you want to do this, you’ll find that you’ll be checking for updates to the ROMs for time to time and updating as newer versions are released.

If you like the ROMs that you are installing you should consider donating, or ‘buying a beer’ to the people that are dedicating all their spare time to bring this stuff to you for free. But I won’t lecture, that’s up to you. You should also consider that there is a very active and friendly Advent Vega community on www.mocado.com that are very welcoming.

Still sounding good? Ok, let’s get started. You’ll need to download the following files and keep them safe somewhere. I suggest creating a new folder called AdventVegaROMStuff or similar and putting all these files in there. That way you’ll always have them to go back to later.

You’ll need these files from the www.myadventvega.co.uk website, these are the manufacturer files and drivers;

• The Windows USB Drivers
• The Manufacturers ROM, currently 1.10

You will need the following files from elsewhere to install VegaComb Beta (Honeycomb for Advent Vega) on your device.

• The Vegacomb ROM from here (@Zebwen aka Newbe5 and @Corvus are the cooks behind this) – Read about this in the next paragraph.
• The super simple Recovery Installer from here or here (@adam.gypo aka add.thebad is behind this gem)
• Update – Simonta, a modaco community member, has written AUDI, the latest drivers are bundled with his great app. You need to grab it here for part 3 of this series

UPDATE – The first link in the list above takes you to the tabletroms forum, to a conversation about vegacomb. The download you want is at the bottom of the first post but be careful, there will be more than one. You want the full version of Vegacomb, not an update from one version to another.

OK, that’s part one. I’m off for a coffee while that downloads into the special Advent Vega ROM directory you created earlier. Catch you in Part 2.