After struggling to decode this guide, I decided to start over and craft my own methods - and my own description.įirst, even though Android includes a Linux kernel, compiling Android isn't very much like compiling a Linux kernel by itself. When I realized I was going to have to configure and compile a special version of the Android-x86 kernel, I naturally enough looked around for guidance and found this guide - an astonishingly uninformative source of information.
My primary reason for this project was to make the kernel more accommodating of different system requirements. The developers behind Android-x86 have expended a lot of time and energy configuring their environment to be suitable for laptops and other small x86 environments, and their default packages will run on many laptops, but - for lack of much SATA drive support - it's compatible with fewer modern desktop machines.
#Install grub on usb android x86 how to
This howto explains how to get the Android-x86 source, modify it, compile it, and install it on a laptop or desktop machine. So moving Android to a laptop or desktop environment represents a philosophical as well as practical departure. But Android is a special case - its Linux kernel is designed to be as small as practical to work on a small platform, using the smallest practical amount of memory and CPU clock cycles. Because of the much wider adoption of Linux since I started using it, and because of a more complete set of runtime modules, most things I added by hand in the old days are now included by default in stock kernels. It's been years since I needed to recompile the Linux kernel on a regular basis. So I decided to download the source, configure the kernel and compile locally for my requirements.
#Install grub on usb android x86 drivers
Some may wonder why someone would want to do this to a perfectly good tablet OS, but to a developer, the reasons are more obvious - you can test software more easily and quickly than with a small Android device, you can set up dual-boot configurations to make Android accessible on machines with lots of resources, you can test different display and peripheral configurations more easily than on a small Android device.īut after downloading several versions of the Android-x86 runtimes, I saw a problem - the default kernel was missing drivers required to support the hardware needed to run on a desktop machine. I recently became aware of a project named Android-x86 that lets Android run on an x86 platform like a laptop or a desktop running an x86 processor. I have recently been developing software for the Android platform and have become pretty enthusiastic about its possibilities.