Windows 10: You can now run Android 8.1 Oreo on your PC with Android-x86 Project

Android-x86 is an open-source project aimed at porting Android OS from the smartphones into the x-86 platform. This project was formerly known as “patch-hosting-for-android-x86-support” aimed at bringing Android to your PC.

The developers have now announced the release of the 8.1-rc1 version to the public. This update is their first public candidate for Android-x86 8.1 which is based on the Android Oreo operating system.

The 8.1-rc1 release provides support for both the 64-bit and the 32-bit architecture with the addition of OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for GPUs of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia with the Mesa 3D graphics library.

Virtual machines by VMware and QEMU are also supported by Mesa 18.1.2. Devices which aren’t supported by GPUs are provided with OpenGL ES 2.0 through SwiftShader for the rendering of software.

Furthermore, devices with Intel HD and G45 graphics are supported with hardware accelerated codecs. This release provides the user with the ability to secure boot from UEFI and also installing to the UEFI disk. It comes with a text-based GUI installer for easier accessibility. They’ve even added support for themes on GRUB-EFI.

A few prominent features included in this release are the addition of support for Multi-touch, Audio, Wifi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only), ability to auto-mount external USB devices and SD cards, extends support for ARM architecture apps through the native bridge mechanism which can be set via the Android-x86 options in the settings.

The taskbar can now be added as an alternative launcher which sets the start menu and the recently used apps inside a tray on top of the screen and supports freeform window mode. For the devices without known sensors, ForceDefaultOrientation has been enabled. There’s even an option to run portrait apps on a landscape device without actually rotating the screen.

Install Android Oreo on your PC

• Get a USB Drive in FAT-32 format
• Download the ISO files from here.
• Connect the USB drive to your computer
• Open the program Rufus. It will detect the connected USB drive.
• Choose the “ISO Image”.
• Now click on ‘Start’.
• The Rufus will flash Android x86 to the USB pen drive
• Restart your computer, enter the BIOS or UEFI and boot from pen drive.

This feature-packed release of 8.1-rc1 contains four files you can choose from depending on your device. 64-bit ISO is the goto file for most of the modern devices and for older devices, 32-bit ISO may be suitable.

The post You can now run Android 8.1 Oreo on your PC with Android-x86 Project appeared first on Windows Latest

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Dual boot Windows 10 and Android-x86


Hello!


Excuse me if this is the wrong section, please move to the appropriate section. My colleague has an old netbook and would like to either install Android-x86 on it or dual-boot with Windows. As I am a bit more advanced, I decided to try it myself so I can help him step-by-step.


The first attempt was to install Android-x86 only in a USB Flash drive. So I removed my test-notebook's hard disk (to avoid any accidents) and proceeded with the installation. I won't go into details as this is not the purpose of this post. After some attempts I did it right and could boot into Android-x86.



Then I wanted to go a step further and dual-boot with Windows. My Colleague is going to use Windows 7, but I had already installed Windows 10 Pro 32-bit on my test-notebook and wouldn't want to format and install 7. Besides, how different it could be using Windows 10? So I loaded Computer Management, then Disk Manager and shrank the Windows partition by about 10GB to make room for the Android-x86 installation. To identify the space easily within Android-x86 Setup, I even created a new simple volume and formatted it as FAT32 and labeled it Android. Within Android-x86 installation there were no partition names, only sizes in KB, but I managed to identify the correct partition and install Android there. When asked I also installed the Grub boot loader to be able to boot into Android and added an entry for Windows. After reboot I expected to boot into Grub and see selections about Andoid-x86 and Windows. But instead I booted into Windows 10! So I thought to use EasyBCD to add a boot entry for Android. Using the Metro interface made no difference and the computer booted into Windows 10 again without giving me any choice. I then loaded EasyBCD again and this time I disabled the Metro interface, so I had the old good Windows 7 (legacy) boot loader. I could see the entry for Android but I could not boot into that. I tried to add a boot entry with Grub (legacy) connected to the Android partition without any success. Then I tried all other available partitions, naturally nothing again. Once I tried to add a Grub2 entry but all I got was an empty list without boot entries, so I saw a Grub command prompt. I know nothing of Grub, so I cannot use this command prompt to boot into Android-x86.


Is anyone familiar with Grub and EasyBCD to tell me what to do? If that helps, in Windows Disk Manager I see 4 partitions and Android is installed in the third partition which is formatted as ext4. In Android Setup I see more partitions (weird) and the Android partition is sda5. Android-x86 was 6.0 RC1 Marshmallow, but I don't think that matters.



Thank you in advance...

 

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Dual boot Windows 10 and Android-x86


Just for the record and for anyone else interested, the solution was to install the Grub2Win. This is the known Linux Grub2 boot loader but installed and configured within Windows in GUI without messing with command lines and unknown parameters which are prone to error. I installed it and added a new boot entry of type "Android". This adds the necessary parameters to load the Android-x86 kernel and boot into Android-x86. One minor correction was to change the path to Android files from Code: Android-6.0-r1[/quote] to Code: Android-6.0-rc1[/quote] which was the correct one for Android 6.0 RC1 that I had installed (yours may vary). Also if it happens that Android cannot boot into graphics mode with the default settings, then you must also add the parameters Code: nomodeset xforcevesa vga=361[/quote] to force VESA 1280x800 24-bit mode. Then save the boot entry. Now you have two boot entries in Windows Boot Loader, Windows 10 and Grub2Win, but to work properly you much switch from standard boot loader to legacy (Windows 7 style) boot loader. To do that open an elevated Command Prompt and give this command:

Code: bcdedit /set "{current}" bootmenupolicy legacy[/quote] At next restart you should see the familiar black screen and two options Windows 10 and Grub2Win, Choose the second and then you should see the Grub2 boot loader and the option to boot into Windows 10 (default) or Android-x86. If you changed the path as required you should be able to boot into Android-x86!