The beauty of android is its open nature. It can be installed on phones, tablets, in car control panels and your PC, among other hardware. Sometimes it is chosen for corporate reasons, and other times it is hacked onto hardware just for the sake of it. This article is about the Android-X86 project, a project to port Android to Intel hardware. Please note, that this project has been running for some time, and is still the only way to get anything above Android 2.3 onto an Intel based device. The new SDK only includes GB for Intel devices.
X86 as I shall now refer to it can be found here, Android-X86. If you go to the download section you will find builds of Android from version 1.6 (Donut), up to 4.0.3 (ICS), and each with builds for varying hardware. If you decide to give X86 a try, it is the hardware support that could prove to be your fist stumbling block. X86 is a hobby project, with no support from hardware manufacturers, so the maintainers tend to only build in support for devices they have, or chipsets that are common. There is however, another way to run X86 and that is as a virtual machine, eliminating the need to overcome any hardware incompatibilities you may have.
Before we go any further, it is probably better to talk about why you might want to run X86. It could be just because you can. I currently have 5 OS’s on my netbook, so that one always works for me. It could be because you develop applications and want an easy way of trying them out. Or, if you are lucky enough, you may have a touch enabled screen on your computer. I am lucky enough to tick two of these boxes: I like installing stuff, and I have a touch-enabled netbook that flips into a tablet. By the end of the year Intel based tablet running win 8 should start to be a common sight, so dual booting Android may be just up your street if you get one. Lastly you may just want to extend the use of an old Netbook or Laptop, with X86 installed you will have a perfect little device for browsing, social networking, and maybe watching some video’s and listening to music.
My initial idea was to explain how to get X86 working on a variety of devices, including a VM, but I feel that the entire article would be taken up going over little changes in hardware, and even then would leave a lot unanswered. Instead, I shall give some links at the end for tutorials and resources to get your X86 up and running.
So how does X86 perform? Actually, it is not too shabby. I have made a very short YouTube video showing it booting and running on my Dell Netbook, and I really don’t think that there is any lag to be seen other than my poor Internet.
To aid with location based apps, X86 comes with a fake GPS app that allows you to set a location and fool the OS into believing you have GPS enabled. Every app that I have run performs on X86 as well as it does on any of my dedicated Android devices, and even better than on most of them. If you have a mess around you will notice that there are a lot of apps missing from the Play Shop. This is because there are a lot of apps that are compiled using ARM specific code, but my advice would be to download to another device and send to a Dropbox type service to see if you can install from there. I have had varying degrees of success doing this, but some apps just will not play at all.
0xbench on stock S2 running ICS LPQ
0xbench on Dell Duo running X86 ICS R1
If you decide to install X86 to a spare partition or USB drive, then there are a couple of things to note. First, if you want to have root access you need to format the partition to the EXT file system, FAT or NTFS will not allow root access. Second, although you can use physical SD cards (they will auto-mount upon insertion), you may find it easier to create a fake sdcard.img file, not a hard task as this is an option from within the installer. Lastly, the bootloader. X86 comes with GRUB legacy, but if you have a Linux install you will probably want to keep the GRUB 2 it comes with installed. Again installing the bootloader is an option during install. If you opt to keep GRUB 2 then you have a little work to get it to boot X86, below is an example of a GRUB2 X86 entry:
### ANDROID ENTRY ###
menuentry “Android-x86 ICS RC1″ {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root=’(hd1,msdos7)’
search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set=root 07ba900b-f75e-41bf-9d49-80c0e2a70d4a
linux /android-4.0-RC1/kernel quiet root=/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=tegav2 acpi_sleep=s3_bios,s3_mode SRC=/android-4.0-RC1 SDCARD=/data/sdcard.img
initrd /android-4.0-RC1/initrd.img
}
To add a working entry to your system, you need to edit the /etc/grub.d/40_custom file with root privileges and add the above. You then need to change androidboot.hardware=tegav2 to match the build that you downloaded and installed from. You will also need to change set root=’(hd1,msdos7)’ to the matching partition number you used during your install. Now simply run ‘sudo update-grub’ and you will have your X86 install listed in grub when you boot.
Now lets see IOS do that 
Problem Solving Resources
If you want to install in a VM and need ethernet access, use this build here
http://www.android-dev.ro/2012/02/22/android-x86-virtualbox-support/
X86 home Page
http://www.android-x86.org/?android
X86 Google Groups Page
http://groups.google.com/group/android-x86/topics
X86 IRC channel is #android-x86 on Freenode, and while it can be a little quiet, it can pay to persevere.
Additionally you can comment below and if possible I will try and help you resolve any issues you may have. Please remember this is still a development release.
