You have ICS on your phone, you have it on your tablet. Well that is if you are lucky enough to have a working rom yet. Life is good and your taking a moment to sit back and take pride in the new lease of life your device now has. Then you get thinking “What I really need is ICS on my laptop, then I would have the full set.”
Now you can have have the full set. Android-x86 have released Android x86 4.0 RC1 that is based on Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich. Now you can have a full taste of Android 4.0 on your laptop. You can install apps, add widgets, shop on the Market just about anything you could normally do on your phone or tablet.
Features include:
Kernel 3.0.8 with KMS enabled. Most netbooks can run Android-x86 in the native resolution.
OpenGL hardware acceleration for AMD Radeon and Intel chipsets. You may disable it by adding HWACCEL=0 to the cmdline if you have trouble to enable hardware acceleration.
Support Multi-touch, Wifi, Audio, Bluetooth, G-sensor and Camera.
Enable v8 javascript engine, ~ 10x faster than old jsc engine. (tested by V8 Benchmark Suite)
Enable chrome http stack to suppoer media streaming.
Simulate sdcard by internal storage.
Experimental support of Renderscript.
External usb drive and sdcard are auto mounted to /mnt/USB on plugging.
Support hybrid mode of iso images.
A text based GUI installer which supports ext3/ext2/ntfs/fat32 filesystems.
Compressed filesystem (squashfs).
Now while all that sounds good in theory how does it work when you get it all up and running? I am afraid I cannot tell you first hand. However one of readers has managed to get it up and running and was kind enough to let us know his first impressions of it. Over to Keith Rea:
For the most part it works as expected except as I mentioned I have a weird bluetooth issue where the mouse pad stops working if bluetooth is enabled and if I use the lock screen option I cant use the mouse to unlock (still trying to figure that one out as the mouse works fine otherwise). I have access to the Android market, sync works fine for all Google related apps (gmail, calendar, contacts, docs etc), over all it works just like ICS on my tablet, same apps same ability. Of course some apps work strange with no touch control some apps misbehave for example Just Pictures will not work with the mouse at all but I can tab through the menus the stock gallery app works fine. Speed is great, boots fast runs, apps fast and closes apps fast.. I saw no lag what-so-ever. Device wise (other then the weird bluetooth issue) everything was found and sorted correctly, even the sdcard slot worked as well as the usb port. Since its an RC I imagine the quirks will be worked out.
And there you have it, once I have a bit of free time I will be giving it a test myself. But if there are any others out there flashing this drop us a line and let us know how you get along with it.
To download head over to the Android-x86 site and also check out the Web Upd8 site for help in installing it. And also thanks to Keith for letting us know how he got along with it.
(via WebUpd8, images from them also)
I’m Robert Best, founder of this little site that you are looking at. And I hail from Lisburn. That is in Norn Iron, or Northern Ireland as everyone else calls us. Now on my 9th Android phone I am always looking for interesting and new things to do with Android. When I am not thinking about Android or anything Android related I can be found making music for either for my solo project or for one or two of the bands I am currently playing with. And there generally is not a moment of the day that goes by without you being able to see me with a cup of black tea.
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