Android x86

[Andrew W]

Android x86 6.0 RC-2 has been released.  http://www.android-x86.org/releases/releasenote-6-0-rc2

This is only a release candidate – But for ‘out of the box’ it works pretty good.

This is the first Android x86 I have been able to get work on an x86 device in a LONG time

Booting LIVE from SD!

Unfortunately there is no ‘persistence’ when using a live boot.

This maybe because I made the Android boot disk from Windows – hence FAT32.

I read Android x86 may (still) have a problem writing changes if installed on a FAT32 partition.

THEREFORE: Perhaps if someone tries to make a ext3/ext4 boot disk from linux there may be ‘persistence’.

Working:

Wifi (2.4 & 5Ghz) & Bluetooth.

Touchscreen. USB. volume keys, Windows Button = Android home

Power saving. Sleeps fine. In fact I seem to have less power drain with this than I do with Windows

Sound & Video : OK could be louder. Youtube playback was fine albeit max quality was 720p (although the resolution of Android 1920×1080 in the settings)

Needs work:

Rotation control: Rotation Control is 180 degrees OUT – so you can lock it in portait or landscape using stock settings.  I prefer “Rotation Control” from the app store.

No Camera: I only tested one app. I can’t remember if on hardware analysis if the sensors showed up or not.

Graphics? – There is a doccumented occasisonal bug for skylake GPUs – BUT I only saw it once. when

on power button – only good for bringing up Power Off but this could be tweaked.

Utilities show 4 cores running between 1.9 & 2.2 GHz… This is obviously the kernel being confused or something.

After all the Core M 6y30 is a Dual Core – Albeit supporting hyperthreading – so more like a quad core.

 

 

*******

Install Fail

Unfortunately my install hangs at the Android logo and I can’t work what is going on.

I’ve never had success installing Android to a hard disk – except maybe one Acer laptop – which I seem to recall there was some decent support for

The Android x86 7.0 Source code has been released which should be very interesting with Multi-window support. This raises a question about how projects like Remix-OS will go competing with Android 7.0

*****

Sorry about the double post

Is it worth downloading the source code and manually building Android?

 

 

[Pedro]

I agree, this is the first Android version that works almost flawlessly on a Core M device.

I have installed Android on a separated ext4 partition and made a Grub entry to boot it. The Grub entry is as follows:

 

menuentry ‘Android’ –class android {

set root='(hd0,5)’
linux /android-6.0-rc2/kernel quiet root=/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=android_x86_64 SRC=/android-6.0-rc2 SDCARD=mmcblk0p1
initrd /android-6.0-rc2/initrd.img

}

My Android system mounts USB drives but it doesn’t mount the MicroSD card, that’s the reason for the SDCARD=mmcblk0p1 workaround.

Rotation is inverted, I’m using the “Ultimate Rotation Control” app from the PlayStore.

Touch could be improved, in my system I feel that I have to touch harder than usual to get a response but swiping works fine, I have the feeling that the touchscreen gets in a battery saving state too soon.

Since the power menu has only the “Power off” option I’m using the “Screen off” app from the PlayStore to put the device to sleep.

The CPU cores seem to run at high frequencies all the time but the device doesn’t get too hot.

Looking forward to future Android-x86 releases, but at this point I almost feel that I have a dual boot device. By the way, the Antutu score is around 136000.

[Andrew W]

Awesome, thanks.

Why does Android x86 have such a crappy install process.

Really I’d expect GRUB to be altered on installation. I haven’t had to manually edit GRUB since ubuntu ~5.

I kind of feel like I’ve forgotted more linux knowledge than I ever knew.

Q. Where did you learn this/learn grub… This seems like it really holds back the x86 Android project back.

hd (0,5) – so that’s the first disk 0 and 5 is an extended partition right?

it would make more sense if I could see a picture of your partition table from Gparted or something.

****

I tried Phoenix OS from USB which is a lot like Remix OS. – Based on 5.1.1 – There was no sound.

When I installed it to the HDD again similar problem to Android. OS doesn’t load just a command prompt.

Remix OS. I can’t use the install utility on my other compter so I just extracted the ISO to USB, Booted fine. Sound worked. Same one-off graphics issue that Android 6.0 is supposed to have with skylake. Same rotation issue too.

*****

Oh when I benchmarked Android 6.0 with Antutu the other day I scored over 150,000. I did have a pretty crappy I/O score probably due to booting from a terrible SD.

 

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Andrew W]

I got a message that you replied again but nothing 8(

Have you tried the first official release of Android 6.0

In RC2 bluetooth paired but didn’t end up working!

Plus the CPU was sitting too high at like 2GHz…

I think skylake really needs a kernel based on 4.5+

[Author]

Posts