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Below are the steps taken by me to build a working Android kernel image for the ADP1 (a.k.a. the developer G1).  This image is based on linux kernel 2.6.27 and relies on the Android 1.5 "cupcake" radio image from HTC.  If you are trying to build a kernel for a different version replace references to cupcake as appropriate below.  As before this page is here as a reminder to me for when I come to do it again.  This is what worked for me, your mileage may vary.

I upgraded my Ubuntu installation from 8.04 "Hardy Heron" to 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" and discovered that adb no longer recognised my G1.  Thanks to the guys over at google groups I discovered the fix is to rename the rules file that I had set up previously.  It would appear there is another rule 50 in Jaunty so renaming it from 50-android.rules to 51-android.rules fixes the problem.

cianer@Feegle:/etc/udev/rules.d$ sudo mv 50-android.rules 51-android.rules 
cianer@Feegle:/etc/udev/rules.d$ adb kill-server
cianer@Feegle:/etc/udev/rules.d$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload
 * Reloading kernel event manager...                                     [ OK ] 
cianer@Feegle:/etc/udev/rules.d$ adb devices
* daemon not running. starting it now *
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached 
HT845GZ51012    device

cianer@Feegle:/etc/udev/rules.d$ 

By default /system/lib/modules (where kernel modules are stored) is read-only and and the adb remount command which remounts the /system partition read-write fails.  Changing this is relatively straightforward but I'm bound to forget how I did it so here goes:

• Initially this is what happened when I tried to push the kernel modules to the phone

  cianer@Feegle:~/images$ adb push ../msm/drivers/usb/gadget/g_ether.ko /system/lib/modules
  failed to copy '../msm/drivers/usb/gadget/g_ether.ko' to '/system/lib/modules/g_ether.ko': Read-only file system
  cianer@Feegle:~/images$ adb remount
  remount failed: Operation not permitted
  cianer@Feegle:~/images$ 
  

Was having trouble building for the G1 because make TARGET_PRODUCT=htc_dream and similar commands were resulting in "unknown product htc_dream" errors.  Turns out this is because when you use repo to pull the android platform source it doesn't pull the hardware specific git repositories - you need to pull extra stuff, as detailed as detailed here.

Now I don't have a problem with the hardware-specific sources not being pulled by default, but I wish whoever maintains the webpage for the Android Kernel sources would think for 5 seconds about the wording of the instructions.  The word "platform" has to be one of the most ambiguous words in programming, so what the fuck does "entire platform" mean and who thought it was a good choice of words?