Good Morning Everyone,
Today we will learn here how to install and run Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich on your PC directly and in VmWare or VirtualBox.
Now you can create and check and make use of android apps directly on your PC and theirs no need to be dependent on a android Phone or a tablet to become and Android hacker or app developer.Howdy, for all the Android developers.
Android,the google’s OS for phones/tablet PC is a Linux based OS basically designed for ARM CPU, but it has also been ported for x86 architecture i.e. Intel/AMD CPU by Chih-Wei Huang. This project is called
Android-x86, you can visit www.android-x86.org or www.androidx86.org for more information. So, we’ii now install Android x86 4 (Ice cream Sandwich) on our PC.You can also install the pre-android versions also. I’m doing it in VmWare but you can also install Android directly on your computer.
STEP 1:Dowmload
Go to wandroid-x86 download page and download the ISO image of your choice, I’ve downloaded the IBM think pad installer,no special reason just that its largest one…
STEP 2:VmWare Setup
You have to change your virtual disk type to be IDE because the default type in VMware is SCSI, and Android-x86 kernel is not configured to support SCSI. You can follow these steps:
- Create a virtual machine.
- Edit virtual machine settings after the virtual machine created.
- Choose the hard disk and remove it.
- Add a hard disk to create a new virtual disk, then you can choose IDE as your virtual disk type.
- When finished, you can install android-x86 normally.
Note: For normal functioning,select:
- Ram : 1024Mb
- Memory : 4Gb
- OS:Linux
- Use advanced method and not typical(or default) and select IDE hard disk
STEP 3:Setup Android x86
You can follow the images to install android 4.04
Bootup your OS by selecting it in Workstation
Android-x86 Live & Installation CD 4.0-RC2 GRUB Menu select ‘Installation – Install Android-x86 to harddisk’ using Keyboard and you will be asked to partion the drive.
Then create a new partition in the free space.
Also mark the drive as ‘Bootable’ by hitting Enter on it and you will be given with this warning(‘Are You Shure’ type)…
Write ‘yes’ and then hit Enter, after writing the filesytem
Then hit QUIT botton
Android-x86 can co-exist with other operating system or data in the chosen partition. If the partition is formatted, you may choose ‘Do not format’ to keep existing data. Otherwise, choose a filesystem type to format. Note the type you chosen must match the partition id, or the boot loader will fail to boot.
Also note if you choose to format to fat32, you will see a warning that android cannot save data to fat32. You can still proceed to install, but the installed android system will work like a live cd system. That is, all data will lose after power off. Therefore we do not recommend to install Android-x86 to a fat32 partition.
Now installer will display a warning, just type Yes to format the harddisk.
If you are lucky, the installation will begin, and you will see the progress bar.
If you see this screen, the installation is complete. Congratulations! Now you can run Andrond-x86 directly, or you can reboot and run it.
Now the OS will boot from the harddisk and then it will display the Welcome screen for Android
These are just followup Screenshots that I took
Here is the final video:
Advanced
How to create a bootable USB stick for Android-x86?
- Use the USB image
Download the compressed USB image, uncompress and dump it to a USB stick. On a Linux host, you can use the command# zcat android-x86-1.6-r2_usb.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdcwhere /dev/sdc is the device name of the target USB disk. However, some broken BIOS may fail to boot such a USB disk. - Create a bootable USB stick by iso
There are some open source tools that can convert an iso into a bootable USB disk, say- Linux Live USB Creator ( LiLi ) – officially support Android-x86
- UNetbootin – see the demo video.
Multi-boot
To boot other operating systems, you have to add items for them to /grub/menu.lst. For example, to boot Windows, add the following:
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
This assumes the Windows is installed to the first partition of the first hard disk. Or you need to change rootnoverify to the appropriate value. See Grub manual for details.
