After going through all of these steps to check out the Android source code (Gingerbread branch), only to come to a compile error, I have decided to try to get the source code from a different source.
Here are the steps that I have taken to checkout the source code from the GitHub.com repository.
I checked out the repo tool from the GitHub.com repository
git clone git://github.com/android/tools_repo.git
Inside the repo script file that was downloaded, I changed the location of the repo tool as follows:
## repo default configuration
##
#REPO_URL='git://android.git.kernel.org/tools/repo.git'
REPO_URL='git://github.com/android/tools_repo.git'
REPO_REV='stable'
After this, I created the repository for the source code using the repo script 'git wrapper'.
repo init -u git://github.com/android/platform_manifest.git -b gingerbread
Which gave me a successful results; "repo initialized in /home/my/directory"
However, when I try to repo sync, I get the following error message:
$ repo sync
Initializing project platform/bionic ...
android.git.kernel.org[0: 149.20.4.77]: errno=Connection timed out
fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection timed out)
error: Cannot fetch platform/bionic
Where are the references to the now-offline android.git.kernel.org? cat repo|grep kernel.org gives me nothing.
Here you can find the howto on checking out from github.