New Blog 1: Android On Netbook

Wednesday 17 October 2012

Android On Netbook

Like the idea of the ASUS Transformer, but don’t want to splash out on a new netbook? Well, I recently stumbled across an article written by Web.AppStorm editor Matthew Guay on How-To-Geek, describing how to run Android on a Netbook. I was intrigued and tried it out as an experiment. Since it runs off a flash drive, nothing is installed or written to the hard drive. Read on to learn about how you can run Android on your netbook, and how it fares.Check that your device is supported: go to http://www.android-x86.org/download and see whether your device type or model is a part of a download name. If it is, download it! I can vouch for the Asus EEE Netbook series. Make sure you download from the Stable section, rather than Deprecated. The download should be entitled something like android-x86-2.2-r2-eeepc.iso.While Android is downloading, grab UNetbootin from here. This tool allows you to unpack and transfer the .iso file onto a memory stick in a format that your device’s bootloader can recognise, and start up.Once the Android-x86 download is complete, open UNetbootin, click the radio button next to ‘DiskImage’. Ensure that ‘ISO’ is selected from the drop-down box, and then click the ‘…’ button at the end of the text box. Browse to the android-x86——.iso you just downloaded, and select it. Check that the USB Drive settings at the bottom are correct, then click OK. Wait a minute or two for the data to be written.