Saturday, November 12, 2011

Run Android on your PC or Laptop

Run Android on your PC or Laptop

  More and more mobile android powered devices enter the market, but the number of netbooks and bigger devices running the android operating system out of the box is still very small. But we thanks to the guys at android-x86.org this is getting easier quickly.  They created installer images for USB and CD where you can choose if you only want to test Android (live image mode) or if you want to install it on  your PC Or laptop.



There are two ways to do this, one is trying out a Live CD/USB version and the other is going for an install of Android in another partition of your Windows based machine. Today I am going to tell you how to run Android using Live CD/USB on your PC or laptop. Later I will cover installing it alongside Windows on another partition as a dual boot feature.

To run Android on your machine using Live CD/USB please follow these steps:

1.   Download the Android OS image for x86 machines from the Android-x86 Project (link here) . You will see multiple files there, if you find the image of your machine specific model, well and good otherwise I suggest you download android-x86-2.2-generic.iso from the Stable Release folder.

2.   Now we need to transfer this image to a CD or USB using some suitable utility. I would recommend you to go for a USB based trial since USBs can transfer data  faster as compared to CD/DVDs. The utility I used to transfer Android image to my USB is UNetbootin. You can download from the UNetbootin website (link here) . Since the procedure listed here is for Windows so download the UNetbootin for Windows.

3.   Install UNetbootin and run it.

4.   Plug in your USB.

5.   Since the UNetbootin utility has multiple uses it can be used to install various versions of Linux as well. Choose Diskimage, select ISO from the dropdown menu, browse your files and point it to the downloaded Android iso image. From the Type choose USB and select your USB drive letter from the drop down menu. Be careful in this step because if you supply a wrong drive all data in in will be overwritten. Finally press OK to proceed. See the screenshot below.





6.   You will see the installation progress, as shown in the screenshot below.



7.   After the installation has completed you can either press Reboot Now or Exit.

8.   If you press Reboot Now the system will reboot. Keep the USB plugged in and set it to USB as first choice in the boot sequence from the Bios.

9.   The Live USB will load necessary files in the RAM. The screen will show various options , select Live CD from the Menu (Run Android without installation). After some time the Android will start on your screen. Enjoy using it. See the image below.









Android has a very good driver database so Ethernet, WiFi and sound etc will work out of the box in most cases. Surf the Internet , play music, watch videos, pics and you can also install applications from Android market.

No comments:

Post a Comment