- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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I think we are on the verge of a new era of partnership with government - Steve 'Understatement' Ballmer
The Android OS comes to the PC
GOOGLE'S MOBILE PHONE operating system called Android has come to the PC in a LiveCD version.
A couple of blokes have recompiled the OS so it's capable of running on a common x86 platform. This is just in time to see what Android is really like, before Acer, Asus, MSI and others officially release their netbooks with the operating system preloaded on them.
The PC version has been ported from an Asustek EeePC 701 netbook running Android. As with every other try-before-you-buy LiveCD, you simply download the ISO file, burn it onto a CD or DVD, and then boot with the disc.
With a LiveCD, there's no need to install the OS, so you can test-drive the software without writing it to your system's hard disk. The LiveCD can also run under virtualisation such as VirtualBox or VMware or the other thing by the Vole.
You can grab the Liveandroid version 0.2 from Google. µ
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Once there are some customizations to the OS, like the Hero version, that suit a PC a bit better it could be useful. If it works well on an arm processor and 192mb or ram (G1) then an atom 1.6ghz and 512mb Ram should be spiffy.
I wonder how much of the Google PC Os will be Android?
This is the Google OS everyone has been so excited about. - Cheers!
Oh wait...get a grip...
this is light version of the expected OS to release around corner sometime later this year or next.
No, this is NOT related to the new Chrome OS. If you were listening earlier, you'd have heard that the Chrome team had has discussions with the Android team, but the Chome OS was NOT going to be based on Android. Totally different focus, totally different teams.
Works well enough in Virtual PC. Since it clearly is just a port from the phone OS and not a fully functional product, it expects a sim card and phone info that aren't available from a PC. If I could actually do something useful with it, I could see a point to it. It doesn't allow me to DO anything useful, hence it is quite literally "Useless".
So what about flash? It won't work will it? Even if it did work the cpu is too slow to render it. The backwards technology bubble astounds me.
Windows key to go back to desktop
ESC to go back one screen
Spacebar to scroll a page down
Arrow keys work also
Runs fine for me in virtualbox 2.2.4. Flash is not installed on there but the web browser does work so that's neat. It renders pages badly but that's what you get with a browser that runs on postage stamp sized screens. I noticed it takes a full 11 seconds to boot up which seems like a long time respecive to how much faster this 2.8Ghz c2d is to a broken ARM.
Yawn, another OS that 2% of the users want!And those only because they live to bash MS.
Why would I care?