Gadgetory

hey guys Joe from pocketnow.com you know we've heard a bit in the news about Intel trying to make an x86 version of Android that'll run on well Intel chips we've also heard that Asus is next a PC isn't going to be running Windows 7 like everyone thought it was they plan on releasing it running Android so that's really good news for people who want to have an Android at netbook or an Android slate or even Android running on Intel processors in their phones because choice is always a good thing well just how far along are they what further than you'd think today I don't want to show you two things one is how to make a bootable Android USB Drive so you can try and boot off of your laptop right now without having to format or risk your operating system then if that doesn't work I'll show you another way using a virtual PC okay I've downloaded two files already the first one is the you netboot installer which is the installer that you use to a download and install Linux distributions two thumb drives and to make live CDs and stuff with the second is the android at 1.6 iso for x86 architecture they don't have anything above 1.6 just yet but it's still a good way to check and see what android can do and once it gets booting I'm told it boots really fast so how do we make this well first of all we change the distribution up here from distribution mode to disk image because we've got the ISO on our desktop we will navigate down to it and there it is right there open that up and then make sure you check this and then check it again we want to put this on a USB Drive and it is Drive D I already have my thumb drive installed that's the safer way to do it we're going to go ahead and say ok it says oh no I've already done this before I know that we're gonna yest all and it's going to extract and copy do a whole bunch of stuff at this point if you'd forgotten about those import and files that you had on your thumb drive it's too late so hopefully you are watching this before you try it yourself because this will erase everything on that thumb drive okay installation is complete and it wants us to reboot now so we're gonna go ahead and do that now depending on your computer you may need to hit a special key to bring up your boot menu in my case that's f12 okay so I hit f12 to get to my boot menu and my options are USB storage removable devices the audio data I want USB and I do have my thumb drive plugged in and at this point it's going to load up this boot menu from unit boot and what I want to do is run android x86 without installation if you're having problems you can go down here to visa mode that helps with a few other monitor types and graphics drivers but what I want to do is just show you the normal run without install and of course you can install it to your hard drive but I really wouldn't recommend that at least not at this point of the game so we'll go ahead and run it without installation and down here at the bottom it says it's detecting android x86 with some dots marching across the screen this is where a lot of people in the forum have said that their install doesn't progress mine as you can see does and I've got an android hash prompt and then I get a cursor up here in the corner you can just barely see that at this point I should have the android logo animating across the screen but I don't have a supported computer now epcs are good I think there's a lenovo in there that's good with visa mode but this dell inspiron 11 just isn't supported by this rom so i'm kind of out of luck i can't show you any further than this but there's some other videos on the internet that show you how to do it what I want to show you however is how to get Android on your laptop so we're gonna pull out the thumb drive get rid of that and we are going to reboot the computer back up into Windows and I'll show you how to set up a virtual PC so you won't really be booting into Android but you'll still be able to run it on your computer hopefully with a little bit more luck than what we just had their first thing I've done here is I've gone out to Microsoft's website and downloaded a virtual pc 2007 I am running on Windows 7 home premium but that's not eligible for the Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC so go ahead and get 2007 you'll get an error saying it wasn't designed for this OS or if you're on Vista or another or less it shouldn't be a problem but in my experience here it's been working just fine so go ahead and download and install that and then we want to click on this new button to open up a new virtual PC wizard we'll go through that create a virtual machine next we're going to call this android x86 you can call it anything you'd like next operating system is other you have Windows and os/2 os is to choose from this definitely is not one of those so we'll say next we're gonna use the recommended amount of RAM which in this case is 128 Meg you could change that if you wanted but for illustration purposes we'll accept the default and then we want to setup a new virtual hard disk this is the storage that that virtual PC is going to use now keep in mind this hard disk is going to be at least that much space so in this case 16 gig on disk and it can grow to be a hundred and thirty and a half gig that's actual space being eaten up on your hard drive so keep that in mind we'll go ahead and finish that and great there we are we want to go now into settings and everything looks good android x86 hundred twenty eight make ram yadda yadda yadda yadda so we're gonna go ahead and cancel that okay now i've gone one step ahead so let me go back we want to mount up that CD so we can boot from it so we're going to capture an ISO image and we're going to navigate back to where we have that ISO on our desktop and choose open and then we're gonna reboot the computer and I'm just gonna reset that okay now what that's going to do it's just gonna run through BIOS this is a virtual PC and then very quickly you can see we're all the way up to our Android live install so I just want to go ahead and run Android without installation now a lot of you are thinking well why not just install it to the hard disk you can try that but I never had any success with it so let's go ahead and just run it from here and see what we get you'll notice we're getting some errors and some warnings that's because this is still in development a really gross screen and you may think at this point to abandon all hope but I've done this before so just hang out don't worry too much about it we'll get past that in just a minute okay I ended up having to reboot the Virtual PC and I decided to boot this time in visa mode and you can see I'm getting a lot better graphical experience sometimes he'll work in that other mode but visa has worked a little bit better for me so we're going to stick with that for now and you can see the Android animation cycles through about three or four times and then here we are we move this up here a little bit for you Center it in the screen now first of all you'll notice here's my Google search and I'm getting a message saying hey if you want to use your mouse cursor inside the virtual machine go ahead and do that but to get out of it you have to press the alt over on the right hand side so once we've done that we can click in here and search for now press enter and if we had networking that would be great we don't so it's not gonna work for us but you can see you can interact with the keyboard there and it's giving us the no network connection so so far so good to go back press the Escape key if you want to keep going back to the home screen here the Menu key should be the window his button come over here and drag the tray out so you can see what comes already inside this you'll notice there are no Google apps in here still trying to figure out how to get those on there including the market which kind of limits what you can do with this click and scroll side-to-side actually I long clicked on one spot so click and drag to move to the other screens this one has three home screens so just like that little bit laggy a little bit hard to control using the the trackpad unfortunately you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it but it gives you a good sense of what you can do using Android on a laptop now I'm really impressed with what you can do with some of the Lenovo's getting them to work just booting up from from your USB Drive and on the epcs as well from what I have heard you can get boots that are under 7 seconds on any PC so if you want something really fast that just gets you online and on those builds they do have networking working or have a workaround depending on which version of the epc you using I'll link over to the the full instructions on how to check and see if your laptop is on the list of supported laptops or if your going to have to do something kind of hacky like I did just to get in there and play with it but for something that's nearly fully functional on an e PC including networking superfast boot time and to let you do what you need to surfing the web is pretty quick and we're talking Chrome here so it's it's still pretty full functioned you'll be able to watch all of your YouTube videos of course no flash on it until we get Froyo and install the Flash Player but overall pretty cool so showing you how to run Android on your laptop I'm Joe for pocketnow.com if you thought this was a cool video thumbs up if you'd like to subscribe to our channel do it now if you don't want to stay in touch with everything that's going on in the world of mobile computing mobile devices well there's nothing I can do to help you