[German]Android x86 is designed to run on Intel CPUs Android x86 is (Windows PCs) and is maintained by the Android x86 project. On June 18, 2018 the Android x86 project announced the release candidate 1 of Android x86 8.1.
You can download the ISO file and run it in a virtual machine like Virtualbox as a live system or you may install it – but I recognized, that Android-x86 8.1 RC1 won't boot in VMware Workstation). You can also create a USB stick and run it on real hardware if the hardware is supported. The problem I had in the last few years: The older Atom processors were no longer supported in Android x86.
Details about Android-x86 8.1 RC1
Android-x86 8.1-rc1 is based on Android 8.1.0 Oreo MR1 (8.1.0_r33). So it's like the current Android version. The following features are implemented in RC1.
- Support both 64-bit and 32-bit kernel and userspace.
- Support OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for Intel/AMD/Nvidia, VMware and QEMU(virgl) by Mesa 18.1.2.
- Support OpenGL ES 2.0 via SwiftShader for software rendering on unsupported GPU devices.
- Support hardware accelerated codecs on devices with Intel HD & G45 graphics family.
- Support secure booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk.
- A text based GUI installer.
- Add theme support to GRUB-EFI.
- Support Multi-touch, Audio, Wifi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only).
- Auto-mount external usb drive and sdcard.
- Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
- Enable ForceDefaultOrientation on devices without known sensors. Portrait apps can run in a landscape device without rotating the screen.
- Support arm arch apps via the native bridge mechanism. (Settings -> Android-x86 options)
All in all, this all sounds very promising – Android is conquering the desktop. I will definitely look at it and test if it runs from USB stick on my netbooks.
Available files
The RC1 version is available as four ISO files for different scenarios. You can select one of these files depending on your devices. Most modern devices should be able to run the 64-bit ISO. For older devices with older BIOS the 32-bit ISO file must be used.
- 64-bit ISO: android-x86_64-8.1-rc1.iso
sha1sum: d6a436467719319ea2b1acfe8c523627c9890484
- 32-bit ISO: android-x86-8.1-rc1.iso
sha1sum: ccf75401f42561099d85706956c8a109f03ba62b
- 64-bit rpm: android-x86-8.1-rc1.x86_64.rpm
sha1sum: 389a283adf635ba2ee8c768b9059a229da250941
- 32-bit rpm: android-x86-8.1-rc1.i686.rpm
sha1sum: 5da8e6af527a20656c4621499cb8e34cfa83fa48
For Windows systems and running in a virtual machine, use the 32/64-bit ISO files. The ISO files can be mounted directly into Virtualbox as a CD drive. Under Windows, a USB stick can be created using a live system with tools such as Rufus. The project page contains more details and installation instructions. And here are the download links.
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