Get some Android 9.0 Pie on your PC
Still waiting for Android 9.0/Pie to hit your phone? Try it on your old PC instead. Darren Yates explains how.
There’s a pretty solid temptation to consider any PC or laptop that struggles to run the latest Windows operating system as having passed its use-by-date. However, that would needlessly remove the opportunity of putting to work one of the many Linux distros – and there are dozens of them now to choose from. While this usually means everything from Elementary OS to Debian or a lightweight homebrew based on an LXDE desktop, there’s another Linux distro you can now add to the list – Android.
We’ve been keeping tabs on the Android-x86 effort since the early days of Ice Cream Sandwich/4.0. Now the first ‘release candidate’ of Android 9.0/ Pie has arrived, we’ll show you how to install it on an older system and give your old kit a new lease of life.
HOW OLD IS ‘OLDER’?
If you think about it, Android is designed to generally run on hardware-constrained devices, like phones, tablets and TVs, so it doesn’t need 8GB of RAM and 512GB of flash storage to run well. But when it comes to Android-x86 and support for older PC systems, just how old a system can you reasonably get away with using? I have an old Compaq Presario CQ42136TU notebook I keep for such occasions – 1.9GHz Intel dual-core Celeron T3100 processor and 2GB of RAM. To be honest, I replaced it back in 2011 because it was slowing down and
SSDs were still a rich man’s game. However, sometime later, I replaced the 250GB hard drive with a spare 64GB SSD and I’ve actually been using it to run the various Android releases ever since. The CQ42 dates from 2010, so it’s probably as old as you’d want to go back, at least for a laptop, but that makes it an ideal testbed to try with Android-x86 Pie.
If nothing else, we’d recommend your test system has at least a dualcore CPU.
SETTING UP A
USB FLASH INSTALLER
Android-x86 9.0/Pie comes as an ISO image, which you’ll need to setup on a USB flash drive to install onto your test system (Android-x86 has no support for CD/DVD drives). There are two versions – 32-bit and 64-bit. For more modern systems, the 64-bit version would be ideal. However,
despite the Celeron T3100 having 64-bit support, we couldn’t get the 64-bit version to fire up – install, yes; boot, no. However, the 32-bit version worked a treat. The 32-bit version is approximately 750MB, the 64-bit around 920MB. Any 2GB or larger USB flash drive will be fine for either version.
However, just remember – the setup procedure will wipe the current contents of the USB flash drive, while the install onto your PC system will erase the contents of the hard drive/ SSD. So the tip is – backup before you start. Personally, there was another reason for replacing the hard drive with an SSD – not only is the SSD considerably faster, it allows me to keep the original drive in its existing condition, so that I can reinstall it if need be and get back my original laptop. Standard 120GB 2.5-inch SSDs, such as WD’s Green drive, are as low as $32 online, so it shouldn’t break the bank, but just check your laptop’s
internal drive connections before you start. The other thing to remember is that Android-x86 9.0/Pie still left me with 55GB of space from a 64GB SSD, so a 128GB SSD will be complete luxury.
Grab the ISO image from android-x86.org/releases/ releasenote-9-0-rc1.html.
INSTALLER SOFTWARE
Once you have the ISO image, plus your flash drive plugged into your normal PC ready to go, find UNetbootin (unetbootin.github.io). It’s easy to use and will combine the ISO image and your USB flash drive to create a ready-to-roll Live USB installer. Once you have UNetbootin, just run it (there’s no app installer), select the radio button next to ‘Diskimage’ and press the ellipsis (…) button on the right. Browse to your ISO image location, select the ISO image and press ‘Open’ to complete the Load sequence.
Now make sure you set the ‘Type’ drop-down box to ‘USB drive’ and the correct drive letter for your USB flash drive. Otherwise, you might fry your PC’s hard drive by mistake. When you’re ready, press the ‘OK’ button on UNetbootin. This starts the unpacking process, copying files out of the ISO image and onto the USB flash drive.
The whole process should take no more than a few minutes. Once complete, remove the flash drive from your normal system and plug it into your old test PC/laptop.
BOOT FROM USB
Now at this point, you need to boot up your old test box into its BIOS to enable booting from the USB flash drive. The key sequence to get into the BIOS setup is different for every system, so check your user manual or just watch the boot screen for the keyboard shortcut that launches the boot menu. Select the USB flash drive as the default boot drive and reboot. Once it boots, you should see a text menu for Android-x86 with a few options – the two key entries are ‘live CD’ and ‘installation’. The first aims to let you trial Android-x86 on your system without installing anything, but as soon as you turn off the system, anything you’ve done on it is lost. The second option is the one you want – install the Android OS onto your device’s internal storage for ‘persistent’ use.
The install process is much more streamlined in this version than in versions past. It’ll recognise all the storage devices on your system – select the main internal storage and that’s about it. The installer formats the internal storage, then unpacks the USB flash drive files and installs them onto the internal storage drive. Remember – everything on that internal system drive will be erased during this process. We found the install here pretty quick, too – the Presario CQ42 laptop had Android installed, up and running within five minutes.
WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN’T?
The team behind Android-x86 originally designed these releases to work with old 2009-era netbooks like the Asus eeePC (remember, those?), but according to the release notes, this new version should provide OpenGL ES3.x hardware video acceleration for Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs. We’ve only tried Intel-based laptops with this, so if you have an AMD laptop or PC, it’d be worth a shot if you have an old spare SSD to play with.
Now all that said, this is an ‘RC-1’
“The team behind Android-x86 originally designed these releases to work with old 2009-era netbooks like the Asus eeePC (remember, those?)”
release, so it shouldn’t surprise if not all the bells and whistles work as they should. However, the Presario CQ42 actually fared pretty well – native screen resolution (despite only low-end built-in GM45 graphics), Wi-Fi and sound working off the bat, enough graphics acceleration to at least get ‘Beach Buggy Blitz’ running at a reasonable clip and the built-in SD/ MMC card reader also played nicely. The keyboard sound volume and screen brightness keys worked perfectly, as did the mouse trackpad. Even the built-in web camera on the screen top bezel fired up and showed images.
As we mentioned before, however, there’s no joy from the CD/DVD optical drive. The other thing we noticed is that the Presario CQ42 didn’t come out of hibernation too well – Wi-Fi stopped working and the notification pulldown gesture no longer worked, requiring a restart to kick back into life. Remember, it is an RC-1 release.
WHICH APPS WORK?
First off, the good news is the distro comes with Google Apps (Gmail, Google Play) built-in – just add in your Google account and away you go. As for security, at this point, I always play it safe and use a test Gmail account on these builds rather than the actual Gmail account on my phone. I’ve not heard any bad things about Android-x86 in terms of security leaks, but I tend to be a ‘glass is one-tenth empty’ kind-of person in this regard.
This x86-Pie distro also has rootaccess and the built-in Security Patch Level is August 2018, which isn’t exactly current. These factors should guide you on how you use it.
The distro also has a screenorientation lock – if you find yourself with activity screens that look more like an old 3.5-inch phone, activate the orientation lock (drag down from top of screen) and to see if it helps.
Now as for the apps themselves, with well over two million apps on Google Play, you won’t be short of options. Google’s Chrome browser is baked in as well – it starts and runs with no issues. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s no YouTube app installed, but you can get this from the Google Play store easy enough. Alternatively, YouTube on the web browser works nicely, too. Either way, the Android-x86 OS runs natively on PC hardware, so you should be able to extract whatever performance your hardware has to offer. The YouTube app for instance delivered 720p resolution video on the Presario CQ42 laptop just fine (the screen is only 1366x768-pixels native, so that’s good enough).
GAMING
There’s a reason we tried ‘Beach Buggy Blitz’ – frankly, with only Intel GM45 graphics to play with, any game more serious than that is going to struggle on the Presario CQ42. Angry Birds Rio
also worked well, but again, your mileage will vary, for sure – the performance you get will be a mix of the RAM, CPU and GPU you have to throw at games. The Android-x86 Pie distro does offer software rendering through Google’s SwiftShader APIs for GPUs that aren’t supported. However, remember that software rendering is going to depend on how much CPU horsepower your device has to spare.
In general, most games are not designed for x86-based CPUs, so the more GPU-enhanced games are likely to crash-on-load a lot more. We can’t give you a definitive working list, since it’ll be hardware-dependent, but plenty of games we tried still crashed on our CQ42. Games that support keyboards will also be important here.
AUDIO/VIDEO
Video playback and recording works on your Android phone because it doesn’t rely on your device’s CPU cores. Rather, most SoC (System on a Chip) chips have dedicated hardware video compression baked in to do the heavy lifting. Most older x86 chips, however, rely on GPU-acceleration for this, so again, your mileage will vary. VLC and MX Player apps from Google Play will give you codec support for just about everything, but I’d suggest from experience a dual-core CPU will struggle to decode video resolution at full frame rate beyond 720p, so you’d want quad-core for 1080p or 4K video playback.
USB-OTG
Android does pretty well with USB On The Go (OTG) support these days and Android-x86 in particular is ready to go, so you should find some fun with your system’s USB ports. As a quick test, we had USB flash storage working for file copy and backup, we also had
USB audio (a cheap CM102 USB headphone/mic dongle) working via YouTube. That augurs well for other USB devices that conform to the USB device standards support generally by Android. Just remember you’ll need to find apps that support USB devices to get any real joy and don’t forget the power limits those USB ports will have when you start plugging things in.
BATTERY LIFE
Speaking of power, Android handles overall power management and sees the battery capacity in percentage, which is always a good thing. While CPU-Z couldn’t find the scaling governor being used to throttle the CPU, overall battery life appeared to be equivalent to the original Windows 7 level on the CQ42. After 40 minutes, the battery had dropped to 79%, call it 80% - that extrapolates out to three hours 20 mins, which is roughly what I’d expect from a 10-year old Lithiumion battery that’s had little work recently (it didn’t last much more than that brand-new).
Hold the power button down and you get a slide-out panel on the right-side of the screen with shut-down, reboot and sleep options – and they generally work well. Android 9 also gives you a user-settable battery saver mode to give it a hand.
WHY ANDROID-X86 IS WORTH A LOOK
The Presario CQ42 came out with Windows 7, which has just gone ‘belly up’ as far as security updates go, with Microsoft finally nailing the coffin shut on January 14. However, I wouldn’t bother installing Windows 8, let alone Windows 10 on this thing, with just 2GB of RAM. Sure, RAM is cheap these days, but a ten-year-old dual-core Celeron is still a ten-year old dual-core Celeron, no matter how much RAM you throw at it. The point is Android-x86 is designed for lighter-weight hardware and works rather well on ten-year old PC hardware. In fact, anecdotally, I’d say a 2GHz Celeron dual-core CPU is probably somewhere near the same postcode as a quad-core 1.3GHz ARM Cortex A53 SoC for general app performance, so it’s not a bad match really.
If you want a genuine desktop experience, I’d probably go with a lighter-weight Linux desktop instead, something with an Xfce environment would do nicely. However, with the best part of three million apps available, Android is a worthwhile OS option to have in your kit-bag.
What’s more, you’re more likely to see Android 9.0/Pie on your old laptop before getting any Pie updates on many recent phones – so that’s something to think about.
“I always play it safe and use a test Gmail account on these builds rather than the actual Gmail account on my phone. ”
Any model of Raspberry Pi A desktop/ laptop/mobile Internet connection Breadboard
2x 330 Ohm resistors (Orange, Orange, Brown, Gold)
1x LED
2x female-to-male jumper wires Code: http://bit.ly/ lxf256telegram
In the tutorial we created a function that would react to a command from the user and post data to Telegram. We can also use Telegram to control the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi.
The code remains very similar to the tutorial code, but we use the GPIO Zero library and import the LED class, then we set GPIO 17 as the pin for our LED.
from gpiozero import LED led = LED(17)
We then change the message handler to look for /led-on . If that command is issued it runs the GPIO Zero code to turn on the LED.
@tb.message_handler(func=lambda msg: msg.text is not None and ‘/led-on’ in msg.text) def send_welcome(message): tb.reply_to(message, ‘LED On’) led.on()
The code to turn off the LED is very similar to turning it on. @tb.message_handler(func=lambda msg: msg.text is not None and ‘/led-off’ in msg.text) def send_welcome(message): tb.reply_to(message, ‘LED Off’) led.off()
Run the code and you can control an LED over Telegram!
We’ve made a video demonstrating, for more go see this: http://bit.ly/lxf256telegram2