android 9.0 (pie) on cube i7 stylus

[nati]

Hi,
After using Android-x86 Nougat on my i7 book for a while, I’ve tried now to install Android Pie 9.0-r2.
so i’ll put some instruction below for manual dual-boot installation alongside windows 10)

Here are the results at the moment after a week of use:
1. General speed and stability feels quite good, I didn’t check with benchmark tools
2. Cameras are not recognized at all
3. Internal storage and SD card are not mounted by default, there is a fix for that below
4. Capcitive touch works after a small change in the bios setup (details below). Wacom pens are also working – now with palm rejection!
5. Rotation is initially not working but there is a fix below
6. Sleep and wake are working with no issues
7. Other things are working well (qifi, bluetooth, sound, display & brightness, type-c charge and usb devices)

Suggested instructions for manual installation including fixes (without booting the iso and the installer):

1. Shrink drive C using “Disk Management” (accessible via win+x shortcut). At least 8 GB is recommended, I’ve replaced my drive with 256 GB SSD so it was easy for me 🙂

2. On the unpartitioned space, create two partitions: First one is 100 MB/FAT32 patition, and the second one is a NTFS partition using the rest of the available space

3. Download the following zip end extract its contents to the 100 MB partition. These are grub4dos files with NTFS extention included and configured to run Android x86
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gmfDY2HOFemM2H83ApL9XPnhdlJBhGja/view?usp=sharing

Important notes:
a. The internal drives would appear as usb devices from android. Be careful not to format them from android if suggested, the risk is clear.
b. For any case, I’ve included also a ramdisk.img file that includes only the rotation fix so that risk could be avoided.
c. Android might create “android/data” and “.trash” directories on the mounted drives. This is normal and nothing to worry about.

4. Download Android pie-9.0-r2 iso from here: https://www.android-x86.org/releases/releasenote-9-0-r2.html. Make sure to use the x64 version and NOT the x86 or the k49 version. Extract the following files to the root of the NTFS partition: initrd.img. install.img, kernel, system.sfs.

5. Download the following modified ramdisk.img file and put it on the root NTFS partition. This file includes modification on init.rc and fstab for fixing the screen rotation and mounting of internal drives
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11RHtIi2cneJX9bzFyx31WAUj4ps-q0pz/view?usp=sharing

6. Create data.img file in the NTFS partition, This can be achieved using tools such as “rmxtools” or “toporesize”
    rmxtools – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6SRTBRxqE1ZbmlPRG5sWmhLd28
    toporesize – https://web.archive.org/web/20170324020742/http://www.henrynestler.com/colinux/tools/toporesize-0.7.1.zip

Note – Android can be booted without data.img, but changes would be lost after restart (just like using a live-cd)

7. Search & download “BOOTICEx64” and use UEFI/edit boot entries to add efi\boot\bootx64.efi from the fat32 partition. I’ll recommend to name the new item “android” or something meaningful

8. On BOOTICEx64, go to bcd/easy mode and add a dummy os to the list, in order to force the boot selection menu to appear every time
do it CAREFULLY and make sure NOT to remove the windows 10 item and DONT set the dummy os item as default selection, this might prevent booting windows after restart!

On windows boot menu the android’s boot loader can be launched from “choose other options\use a device” menu

*Note! – The reason for doing this step is that windows boot menu supports touch & pen and so android can be selected without the keyboard, and with 2-3 taps that we can easily get used to. I didn’t find any efi bootloader that supports touch or even volume buttuns on the cube i7 book. This might not be perfect but accessing android / grub directly from bootmgr’s os selection mode is impossible on uefi mode.

9. in order to enable touch, enter the bios setup and go to:
chipset/pch-io configuration/serial io config/touch panel and change it to “i2c touch”

10. I haven’t tried, but theoretically it’s possible to put data.img on a SD card for saving space on the internal drive.
this requires a small change in the boot\grub\grub.cfg file

That’s it, Android can be now booted from windows boot menu as desribed in (8.) or directly from the bios setup boot override options

And sorry again if my english is not perfect…

[JH]

Hi

I’m interested to install androidx86 like yours on my i7 book, but the link for grub4dos file is broken. Can you please share the files again? Appreciate your help.

[Mc]

I’ve seen you guys is the only active for Cube i7 Book, just a question. Do you still have the Drivers for windows all links i’ve found is already dead?

[nati]

JH wrote:

Hi I’m interested to install androidx86 like yours on my i7 book, but the link for grub4dos file is broken. Can you please share the files again? Appreciate your help.

Sorry for that…

I’ve re-uploaded the zip again:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nucQKhPbiZZ4mfzIe1ru4FSelKrepGYK/view?usp=drivesdk

[Author]

Posts