Get Android 8.1 Oreo on your PC
Still waiting for an Oreo update for your phone? Stop holding your breath and install it on your old computer or a virtual machine instead. Darren Yates shows you how.
There’s no question the whole Android OS update process is a bit of a mess — some majorbrand phones promised an Android Oreo/8.0 update that was announced back in September last year still hadn’t received them by early July this year (mine included). In fact, we think we’re at the stage of just assuming your phone won’t receive an upgrade until it’s booting up on your device screen. Meanwhile, if you still want to tuck into some Oreo flavour, trying pulling out an old laptop or create a virtual machine — thanks to Android-x86.org, you might just get Oreo running on a PC sooner than some phones.
ANDROID-X86
If you’ve never heard of it, Android-x86 is a group dedicated to bringing Android to Intel-x86 hardware. The team has built installable Android images going back to pre-Gingerbread/ 2.3 and recently announced the first ‘release candidate’ for Oreo/8.1. There are two versions — a 32-bit release for older x86 hardware and a 64-bit version for newer x86_64 kit. Choose your option from the OSDN site at osdn.net/projects/android-x86/ releases/69704. We recommend the ‘ISO’ image versions (not the .rpm packages), as we’ll use them to install Oreo onto an old dual-core Intel laptop and a VirtualBox virtual machine.
WILL IT WORK ON MY OLD PC?
Given this is only a ‘release candidate’, there are no guarantees — the best we can suggest is ‘your mileage may vary’. That said, it’s easier to get Android running on a PC than a phone for two reasons. First, PCs generally have far more storage than phones, so it’s easier for PC operating systems to include a broader range of device drivers. The Android OS designed for your phone includes only the device drivers for your phone (plus generic options such as USB Mass Storage drivers). Second, the PC platform is more standardised than Android smartphone hardware, which is why Windows can install on your PC before you’ve installed the motherboard device drivers. By contrast, there’s no such thing as a generic smartphone — every phone comes with different combinations of hardware and because it makes no sense for phone makers to include unnecessary device drivers, phone OSs include nothing unnecessarily (well, at least as far as drivers are concerned). Oreo-x86, however, comes with a broader range of drivers than normal.
OUR TIPS
Do not attempt to install this directly onto your main computer, even in ‘live’ trial mode — grab that old laptop holding up a shelf in your garage instead. We’d also remove the working hard drive from that old system and replace it with a small solid-state drive. Out test Compaq laptop has an old 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD — too small for Windows, perfect for Android.
Even so, this process is somewhat complex and probably best not tried if you’re a total beginner, unless it’s on hardware you’re don’t mind wrecking if it all goes pear-shaped.
Oreo-x86 installation takes up 5.9GB, but if you don’t have a spare PC, try a virtual machine via Oracle’s open-source VirtualBox. We’ll get to virtualisation in a moment.
CREATE BOOTABLE USB DRIVE
Android-x86/Oreo operates as a ‘live’ distro, meaning you don’t have to install it on a system drive like Windows in order to give it a test run. Personally, I still wouldn’t even trial it directly on your main computer, just in case something goes wrong. If you’ve played around with a Linux ‘live’ distro, it’s a similar deal. The first step to getting Oreo on your old system is to create a bootable USB drive from the ISO image you downloaded. For that, grab the UNetbootin tool from unetbootin.github.io. There are versions for Windows, macOS and Linux — we’ll use the Windows version. However, before you launch the tool, plug in a USB flash drive into your PC and make sure you copy off any files you want to keep — they won’t be there when UNetbootin finishes writing Oreo.
Any flash drive of at least 1GB capacity will do — Android-x86 uses a compressed filesystem, so the ISO image only expands marginally when written to the flash drive, from 675MB to 685MB, so a 1GB or larger flash drive will be fine.
Once you’ve backed up any important files, launch UNetbootin — there’s no install, it just runs. When the app appears, ignore the ‘Distribution’ option at the top and click on the radio-button next to ‘Diskimage’. Press the ‘...’ button to the far-right and select the ISO image you just downloaded. Next, select your flash drive letter from UNetbootin’s ‘Drive’ combobox and when you’re ready, press the OK button. It’ll take a few minutes to write but when complete, you should have a working bootable Android Oreo flash drive.
INSTALLING OREO ONTO YOUR PC
The first thing you must do before the actual installation onto your old computer is set it to boot from the USB flash drive — for that you’ll need to plug your freshly made bootable flash drive into your old system, boot up into its BIOS boot options, select the flash drive, save settings and reboot. After rebooting, you should come up to a DOS-like menu screen. There’s an ‘audo-installation’ [sic] option that allows for a simpler automated installation of Android onto your old computer’s internal drive, but again, be warned — if that drive has files on it that you want to keep, back them up before-hand because they won’t be there once the install write process begins. As you go through the DOSbased install screens, you’ll need to select the drive and confirm install. When the install is complete, remove the bootable flash drive and reboot.
Once the system reboots, you should eventually get into Android’s initial language setup screen — if you’ve ever set up an Android device before, the process should be familiar.
HARDWARE SUPPORT
What hardware should you expect Android-x86 Oreo/8.1 to support? That’s hard to define, but we’d suggest the older your test system, the more likely more of its hardware will work — to a point. Android doesn’t support optical (CD/DVD/Blu-ray) drives and Android-x86 is no different. However, we found that just about everything else in our test Compaq Presario CQ42 laptop worked straight away. We had no trouble with USB flash drives — you just plug them in and within a few seconds, they’ll mount and appear in the Files app. From our flash drive, we also had 720p HD MPEG4 video playback with sound coming from the speakers and no dropped frames. We had the laptop’s full 1,366 x 768
pixels of resolution available, even working Wi-Fi first-go, along with the physical keyboard and mouse trackpad. Pressing the laptop’s power button brought up a basic shut down/ reboot menu on the right side that worked as requested. Screen brightness controls, both keyboardbased and in Android’s Settings menu, also worked nicely.
As we said before, we can’t guarantee all of your machine’s hardware will have ready-to-go driver support, but from what we’ve seen so far, Android-x86 Oreo-RC1 looks pretty good on that front.
SOFTWARE SUPPORT
The nearly-6GB footprint of Oreo/8.1 might seem quite high, but there’s little fat in that — it’s basically just a standard Android Open Source Project (AOSP) platform build. The most important software inclusion is the GApps (Google Apps) install, which gives you Gmail, Chrome web browser, Google Play and YouTube apps ready to go. Importantly, and somewhat surprisingly, this Oreo/8.1-RC1 release includes root-access, plus the Superuser app to handle SU requests. Ultimately, though, this allows you to build your choice of system — nice and lean, or loaded with all your favourite apps.
INSTALLING ON A VIRTUAL MACHINE
If you don’t have a spare computer, the other option is to make one out of software, using virtualisation. A virtual machine is a computer made out of software, but it still needs to siphon off some RAM and storage from your real or ‘host’ computer, as well as access your computer’s CPU. Grab VirtualBox from virtualbox.org/ wiki/Downloads.
Install it, launch it. Press the New icon on the Manager window. To speed up installation, press the ‘Expert Mode’ button when the Create Virtual Machine window appears. In the new Expert Mode, give your virtual machine a name, set the Type and Version settings to ‘other’. Set the memory of your virtual machine to 1GB or 25% of your machine memory, whichever is greater. Your host computer will need at least 4GB of system RAM to allow your virtual or ‘guest’ computer the 1GB of RAM it needs to boot up. In the Hard Disk groupbox, select the ‘Create a virtual hard disk now’ radio button and press the Create button.
The ‘Create Virtual Hard Disk’ window will appear. Start by choosing the ‘VMDK’ radio button in the ‘Hard disk file type’ area, then choose a file location at the top for your virtual hard disk — this will be a file on your ‘host’ computer that contains the full file system of your virtual machine. Your virtual machine will need at least 16GB of storage to get started, so your ‘host’ computer needs at least 40GB of free storage to be safe. When ready, press the ‘Create’ button. This now takes you back to the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager and your new virtual machine should be listed on the left-side. Select it and press the Settings button. When the new Settings window appears, press System on the left menu, select the Processor tab and push the Processor(s) slider to the end of the green area (that’ll give your VM your system’s full complement of CPU cores to play with). Next, select the Storage entry on the left menu and in the new Storage Devices groupbox, you’ll see two entries under ‘Controller: IDE’ — the VMDK file, plus the optical device, which initially
will say ‘empty’. Click on the ‘empty’ entry, then click on the disc icon top-right under ‘Attributes’ and select the Android ISO image you downloaded. When you’re done, press OK.
Now you’ll be taken back to the main Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager window. Click on your virtual machine from the list and press the greenarrowed Start button. This launches your virtual machine and within a few seconds, you should see the Android-x86 boot menu. Select ‘Run Android-x86 without installation’ to fire up Oreo. This will launch a working version of Oreo-x86 within your virtual machine, which you can setup as if setting up a new phone. Just be aware that as soon as you shut the VM down, all Android settings are lost.
PERSISTENT VM INSTALL
If you want to keep Oreo-x86 permanently on a virtual machine, you need a ‘persistent VM install’. Here’s how. Create the virtual machine setup as before, but when you come to the boot menu, select the ‘Installation — install Android-x86 to harddisk’ option. When the ‘Choose Partition’ window appears, select ‘Create/Modify partitions’ and click the OK button. Select ‘no’ when asked about GPT options to launch the cfdisk utility. Use the left and right arrow keys to move to ‘New’ and press Enter. Next, select ‘Primary’ and press Enter. Press Enter again to use the full virtual disk capacity you set previously and this takes you back to the cfdisk menu. Select ‘Bootable’, press Enter. Scroll to ‘ Write’ and press Enter. Type ‘yes’ to acknowledge and press Enter again.
When the menu returns, scroll to ‘quit’ and press Enter. You’ll drop back to the Choose Partition window, which now has device ‘sda1’ highlighted. Press the OK button. Select ‘ext4’ for the filesystem format option and press OK. Now press ‘yes’ to acknowledge the virtual disk will be wiped during format. Once complete, you’ll be asked if you want to install GRUB. Select ‘yes’ and press Enter. Choose ‘no’ for a readwrite ‘system’ directory, press Enter and the filesystem will be written. Once you get the ‘Congratulations’ screen, select ‘File > Close’ from the surrounding virtual machine app menu. Go back to the VirtualBox Manager window, select your VM from the left-side list and click the Settings icon. Select Storage from the left-side list, right-click on the Android-x86 ISO file entry in the ‘Storage Devices’ groupbox and select ‘Remove Attachment’ (if you don’t, it’ll never boot from the virtual disk). Press ‘Remove’ to confirm. Click the OK button on the Settings window, you’ll go back to the VirtualBox Manager window, select your VM again from the list and this time, press Start. Your virtual machine will now boot up from the virtual hard disk and any changes you make will be persistent. To delete the virtual machine, including the virtual hard disk file, right-click on your virtual machine in the VirtualBox Manager and select ‘Remove’ from the context menu.
GIVE IT A GO
If you want to try out Oreo/8.1 without spending up big on a Pixel2 XL or Samsung Galaxy S9, installing Android-x86 8.1-RC1 on either an old laptop or a virtual machine is probably your best bet. We found RC1 did crash on the odd occasions, but it’s certainly a workable solution that’ll give you a feel for the new features incorporated within Google’s latest mobile OS.