Our buddy Kamal over at gadgetmix decided to load up the Android x86 version on his Eee PC 701 to see how it ran. He said he was a little reluctant at first, because this OS was meant to be run on a mobile phone. He said it surprised him though because it ran flawlessly on his Eee, of course he only tested the browser and a few apps.
Want to try this on your netbook? First download the Android iso from Google (here).
Then download unetbootin and use it to burn the iso onto a flash drive. Kamal said he had to use the ext3 partition option because neither ext2, FAT32 or NTFS was working correctly.
After the flash drive is configured properly installation of Android only takes around 30 seconds and takes up 20mb. Now that’s some efficient coding. The bootup takes around 30 seconds which isn’t very good but shutdown takes less than a second and resume from standby takes around 3.
The drivers seem to work fine including all keyboard buttons and even webcam, but the browser doesn’t support flash yet.
The bottom line is that Android is meant for smartphones, and while it can be run on a netbook you won’t want it as a main OS because it’s just too limited. If, however, you want to use it for a dual boot when you just want some blazingly fast web browsing then give it a try.
If you want to try this out you might want to visit Android-x86.org for some helpful hints and bug fixes.
via gadgetmix
