Android-x86

Run Android on your PC

Release Note 9.0-rc1

(2019/11/15)

The Android-x86 project is glad to announce the 9.0-rc1 to public. This is the first release candidate for Android-x86 9.0 (pie-x86). The prebuilt images are available in the following site:

Key Features

The 9.0-rc1 release is based on the latest Android 9.0.0 Pie release (android-9.0.0_r50). The features include:

Support both 64-bit and 32-bit kernel and userspace with latest LTS kernel 4.19.80.
Support OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for Intel, AMD, Nvidia and QEMU(virgl) by Mesa 19.0.8.
Support OpenGL ES 3.0 via SwiftShader for software rendering on unsupported GPU devices.
Support hardware accelerated codecs on devices with Intel HD & G45 graphics family.
Support secure booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk.
A text based GUI installer.
Add theme support to GRUB-EFI.
Support Multi-touch, Audio, Wifi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only).
Auto-mount external usb drive and sdcard.
Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
Enable ForceDefaultOrientation on devices without known sensors. Portrait apps can run in a landscape device without rotating the screen.
Support arm arch apps via the native bridge mechanism. (Settings -> Android-x86 options)
Support to upgrade from non-official releases.
Add experimental Vulkan support for newer Intel and AMD GPUs. (Boot via Advanced options -> Vulkan support)
Simulate WiFi adapter by Ethernet to increase app compatibility.
Mouse integration support for VMs including VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware and Hyper-V.

Released Files

This release contains four files. You can choose one of these files depends on your devices. Most modern devices should be able to run the 64-bit ISO. For older devices with legacy BIOS, you may try the 32-bit ISO.

64-bit ISO: android-x86_64-9.0-rc1.iso
sha1sum: 89d47aeb419b4124002af68aeb584dae75653eb3
32-bit ISO: android-x86-9.0-rc1.iso
sha1sum: ac546a8ea1eb275ecdbe77f9e8e33fa80668bef4
64-bit rpm: android-x86-9.0-rc1.x86_64.rpm
sha1sum: 6abd0a0bff86fd202f967f8f6add2ab1709ba244
32-bit rpm: android-x86-9.0-rc1.i686.rpm
sha1sum: 2e5e222e2b3ec7ec453fcdf0839058267fc0d493

To use an ISO file, Linux users could just dump it into a usb drive to create a bootable usb stick like:

dd if=android-x86_64-9.0-rc1.iso of=/dev/sdX

where /dev/sdX is the device name of your usb drive.

Windows's users can use the tool Win32 Disk Imager to create a bootable usb stick.

Please read this page about how to install it to the device.

Except the traditional ISO files, we also package android-x86 files into a Linux package rpm. It allows Linux users to easily install the release into an existing Linux device with a standalone ext4 root partition. On an rpm based device (Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS/SUSE...), just install it like a normal rpm package:

sudo rpm -Uvh android-x86-9.0-rc1.x86_64.rpm

This will update your older installation like 7.1-r3 or 8.1-r3 if you have.

On a deb based device (Debian/Ubuntu/LinuxMint/...), please use the alien tool to install it:

          sudo apt install alien
          
          sudo alien -ci android-x86-9.0-rc1.x86_64.rpm

All files will be installed to the /android-9.0-rc1/ subdirectory and boot entries will be added to grub2 menu. Reboot and choose android-x86 item from the menu to boot Android-x86. Alternatively, you can launch Android-x86 in a QEMU virtual machine by the installed qemu-android script:

sudo qemu-android

Note Android-x86 running in QEMU and the real machine (after rebooting) share the same data sub-folder.

To uninstall it :

sudo rpm -e android-x86

or (on Debian/Ubuntu/LinuxMint/...)

sudo apt-get remove android-x86

Known Issues

Google Play Service may crash sometimes on the 32-bit image.
Suspend and resume doesn't work on some devices.
Nvidia GPU (nouveau) may hang sometimes.
3D support of VMware is broken. (only non-accelerated mode works)
Taking photos doesn't work if Vulkan is enabled.

Source code

The source code is available in the main git server.

        repo init -u git://git.osdn.net/gitroot/android-x86/manifest -b pie-x86

        repo sync --no-tags --no-clone-bundle

Read this page for how to compile source code.