Looks like there’s a pretty easy way to install Ice Cream Sandwich, the newest version of Android, on your Netbook. Actually this is limited to a few types of hardware including netbooks like the eeePC. That’s because the ISO files used during installation have been tailored to the hardware used on those devices. As with other Linux distros, the ISO file can be loaded on a thumb drive using Unetbootin. From there you can give it a whirl as a Live CD (or USB as it were) or choose to install it on your hard drive. We haven’t given it a spin as the eeePC version doesn’t want to boot on our Dell Mini 9, but we don’t see a reason why this couldn’t be set up as a dual boot option.
Now why would you want to run Android on your netbook? We’ve already seen that there’s a way to run Android apps in Ubuntu. We bet some people just love Android, and others just hate the Unity desktop that Ubuntu now uses… especially when the Netbook Remix had a lot of good things going for it.
I might have to give this a try on my HP Mini, probably won’t boot though.
I have an old 601 and 901 that i would like to try this on, but i cant seem to find either power adapter. FML
I’m gonna try it on my Dell Mini 10V. They offer a ‘generic’ ISO, hopefully it will work. Awesome concept!
I have an EeePC 1005-ish I will try this on when I get some spare time. It’s just hanging out collecting dust waiting for a good hack (and a new CMOS battery…), and this sounds like a good start.
>Now why would you want to run Android on your
>netbook?
maybe because you enjoy 100ms of input lag? or shitty Audio subsystem that doesnt let you play sounds with low-latency?
I installed this about 2 hours ago on my acer one d255 netbook. It works very very well, far better than the old froyo releases
Also works with VirtualBox 🙂
all the talk and work is going on over at the android-x86 android google group.
http://groups.google.com/group/android-x86/
there you can find images for many different models of netbooks and laptops. there is one tailored for Xseries thinkpads that use the wacom stylus and everything works wonderfully. one real reason to want to run android is breathing some new life into these old systems (hdd-less x41 tablets can be had on ebay for around $30!) and put them back to work!
This is great and all, but … How do you turn it off? Pressing the power button just locks the screen.
On phone-like devices, holding it down for a bit pulls up a menu for reboot/shutdown etc. Can’t do that here, because that usually tells our BIOS to cut the power!
This might work though:
shutdown -k wait
Run that from a shell on the device, or use adb to run it remotely from another machine.
Might also try:
busybox poweroff -d 8 -f
The ‘8’ is the number of seconds to wait. Make sure you give it time to close stuff, dismount etc.
I was under the impression that the wait time was before things started unmounting. Do they manage that differently with android? on my Debian system the time is before starting any shutdown sequences, and then it’s ‘as long as it takes’ before it actually sends the TERM signal to the kernel.
Or you can just do this for free on a VM
the androids SDK already includes an ARM VM to run the whole system
If you’re looking for a lightweight debian based distro I think Crunch band(#!) is the best. Don’t even bother with the ubuntu netbook remix.
But im totally going to try this on my netbook, great post.
I believe you mean Crunchbang
http://crunchbanglinux.org/
I actually work on this stuff on a daily basis (we use the Android-x86 on test laptops to test out some of our kernel level radio code). I’ve worked with both the Honeycomb and ICS branch and have compiled the source to work on just about any x86 platform I can get my hands on (including an Alienware M14X) .. Unfortunately I had to fix some bugs in some source files in order to get certain things to work (like DHCP) .. BUT, once you get it to work, it’s a pretty cool way to check out and play with the Android OS. Wouldn’t recommend it as an actual desktop OS though as your functionality is severely limited, it does open the door to any home brew hardware makers looking to get a foot in somewhere 😉 Either way, think I might join up on the bug fixing of the Android-x86 source …
Same here. I had no problem with early releases of x86 android but the latest can’t seem to find some of the hardware earlier versions could. Don’t really know why (im not an android dev) but I had to do a little tinkering too. As with most non-windows OSes, it likes to shove your bluetooth adapter down your throat lol (Hey look your bluetooth adapter is STILL installed messages), but overall it runs pretty well P3 733mhz on up as far as I have seen. If you haven’t tried JoliOS, give it a shot sometime as well 🙂 Glad to know I wasn’t the only one who had some issues like that.
Without a touchscreen its useless.
Try a mouse? All sarcasm aside, my EeePC 900 recognized my Logitech USB (wireless) laser mouse without even installing anything. Also started the wireless, the built in webcam and even connected to google without me doing anything but logging in with my gmail account. It was actually too easy. I was expecting to have some fun in doing some work, but I didn’t get to do anything but log in. Damn thing even downloaded all the apps I wanted (about 60 of them) and not one didn’t function properly. So, I deleted the linux and installed it permanently. I can always get the Linux back if I get bored.
Running on my acer aspire one just now, really sweet! except that my keyboard layout is wrong (swedish keyboard)
Is this somehow different than Android-x86?
Didn’t read much into it, did you? That’s exactly what it is!!
Arg, Unity desktop. It’s FANTASTIC, when it works. I had it installed for a week and loved it. Lots of little features that made it great on my 1024×600 netbook screen.
Then it broke all by itself. Won’t show any apps. Something wrong with the internals.. I did a lot of poking around and found others with the same problem, and no explanation. A lot of fixes that did nothing.
I really hope they get it figured out, because Unity desktop is fantastic, WHEN IT WORKS!
It’s me again. I got it running on my EeePC 1005HAB. I’m posting from it now. Runs great so far, but live wallpapers are laggy. I already like it better, breaths new life into it.
A mate of mine has a dual-boot netbook that came with Android 1.6 and Windows 7 on it. Like others, I didn’t see the reason for Android on a netbook, but when it turns on in a heartbeat and the Internet soon after, it makes it great for quick surfing.
Might have to suggest this to him and see what he can get out of it..
Android on an x86 PC doesn’t seem nearly as much of a hack as Ubuntu on an (ARM) Android device.
Not to take anything away from this, I’m just saying that the latter provides more functionality and takes a greater degree of skill (until its packaged into an image and distributed).
This would be great for my carPC. I’m running a Dell Mini9 as well though.
Meant to post a link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/icyfyer/6139863749/in/photostream
I got it to boot on my Mini 9 but no luck on wifi.
Very Cool, I got it to boot on my wife’s dell mini 9 but no luck on wifi.
I’m gonna try it on my lenovo thinkpad s10-3t
with a touch screen :-).