Great news for HTC Vivid owners!! As the title suggests, the HTC Vivid might get a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich much sooner than we thought. After all, ICS is the flavor of the season currently, and there are multiple devices out there which are already running working builds of custom Ice Cream Sandwich Roms, thanks to the awesome developer community on the Android platform. XDA member thecubed, who is quite well known for his development of custom ROMs for the LG Revolution, has managed to port a build of Cyanogenmod 9 or CM9 on to the HTC Vivid. Having said that, it is a very early build, and is still under development or work-in-progress state, and the only thing that is does is to boot up on the Vivid. Some basic things like the touchscreen, lights and vibrations work, but definitely not anywhere close to the ROM being suitable for anything more than testing, as of now. thecubed managed to get it to boot and stay stable for a couple of minutes before it started acting up. The good news is that since the ROM is able to boot up on the Vivid, (booting up being the key component), it is just a matter of time and some intensive development, before it is able to function as a fully working rom.

Have a look at what works at this point, as quoted from the developer’s thread:

What works?!

  • Touchscreen
  • Lights
  • Vibrate
  • Buttons
  • Basic Graphics
  • USB Debugging

Beyond that list, not much else.
I’m still having some issues with libgralloc and the new ICS 2d acceleration, as I’m completely unfamiliar with it.

Like I mentioned earlier, the ROM is still in a very early state of development.  While the dev has not really gotten to a stage where he can provide us with a working copy of the ROM file that can be downloaded and flashed to your Vivids, he has included the github repositories which can be used by anyone with knowledge of ROM compilation and Android programming to build a ROM from scratch. Have a look at what the developer says:

That’s okay, where can I download it??
Right now I’m debating releasing my “alpha6” which is stable enough for people to aid in debugging, but as you’ll see in my teaser pics/video not stable enough to even really use to debug at all.

How can I play along? I wanna build it from scratch too!
Awesome. I set up everything you’ll need on my github account.
Just pull my repos to the proper places, and make some bacon.

https://github.com/thecubed/android_…liday/tree/ics
https://github.com/thecubed/android_…liday/tree/ics
You’ll need both repositories to compile a working version…

All the instructions you need are in the README of the device tree.
That said, these repo’s aren’t 100% up to date with my working versions just yet, since I tend to work locally then push milestones to github.

You can visit the development thread HERE, to check for progress updates.

And, if you want to put those developer skills of yours to test, you can visit the GitHub links above and have a go at  exercising those creative juices of yours, after all, more the merrier, and you just might come up with a working build. In case you manage to get somewhere, do let us know in comments below.