Now that they have moved to Froyo this might be a better alternative to develop/test apps on as opposed to the extremely slow emulator. Hopefully there is a VBox/Vmware compatible image available.

I think they said the emulator is slow because it doesn't have GPU acceleration and because it's emulating the ARM architecture on the x86 (though this might not be a very big issue). They said a fix is coming by the end of the year.

Its even slow to run it on a phone. I specifically made sure to use a game framework that has both desktop/phone support to do most of my development on the pc and port it later on. Saves so much time getting around running apps on the phone when unnecessary to the development cycle.

Which one do you recommend?

Yeah, that emu is painful.

I tried it in a VirtualBox. Runs smoother than the emulator from the Android Development Kit, but still a bit sluggish. I'll give it another try on my netbook.

Which image did you boot from? I'm trying to run this within qemu, but I never managed to get network working.

The android emulator works fine and running any linux distro inside qemu likewise.

I'm using something like this:

  kvm -soundhw es1370 -net nic -net user \
  -cdrom android-x86-2.2-r2-asus_laptop.iso

and when pressing ctrl-alt-2 i get:

  QEMU 0.14.0 monitor - type 'help' for more information
  (qemu) info network
  VLAN 0 devices:
    user.0: net=10.0.2.0, restricted=n
    rtl8139.0: model=rtl8139,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:56
  Devices not on any VLAN:
  (qemu)

but network doesn't work and I'm unable to change the network settings from the android configuration menu.

I used the eeepc image. There's a guide describing the necessary settings: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

This might be useful: a cycle-accurate ARM->x86 JIT, made for the Desmume emulator: http://akuvian.org/src/desmume_jit.diff

Since Android doesn't need the same absurd level of cycle-accuracy (the DS basically relies on it for synchronization), it'll be even faster there.

I just downloaded the generic nightly iso and installed it with VirtualBox. It seems to work well. The keyboard shortcuts where a bit of trial and error, but I determined that the "Home" key is what you'd expect. The escape key is back. "End" key is the power switch. Overall seems to work pretty well. Just need to figure out how to get the market installed and test out USB debugging.

I recently ran android 2.2 on my asus eee 701 512mb ram. Blimey it's fast! My next project is to convert my eee into a tablet.

Don't forget to write a post about it!

Google already ported Android to x86 for the Atom-based GoogleTV 1.0. (GoogleTV 2.0 will add support for ARM settop boxes.)

I'll wait for the 4.0 version until I try it on my PC. Before 3.0, it's not a very good experience to use it on a PC.

Is AOSP ever going to get the 3.x branch? Will the 4.x code be released? It's starting to be a serious bummer.

Yes, 4.0 will be released, and there will also be notebooks on the market with Android 4.0 by holidays I think (made by Asus, etc). But Looking forward to the 4.0 version for my own netbook, too.

I'm pretty sure the grandfather meant "released" in the sense of "I want the source code released" and not in the sense of "I want a product using it released".

Will market apps be able to run on x86 since it's ARM code?

Most Android apps (developed with the Android SDK) are Dalvik byte code, not native ARM code, so they should run just fine.

Apps that use native code (the developed with the NDK) probably won't work. A lot of games use at least some native code in order to leverage existing non-java libraries or code bases(the Box2d physics library for example).

okay, that might explain why i couldn't get alchemy to work

Have you guys seen http://bluestacks.com/? It seems to solve the geekish-ness around Android-x86.

Is there a way to run the Market on this?

I don't know. CyanogenMod allows to download official Google apps in a zip file.

If these apps are 100% java (no native arm code) as I think they are, then It might be possible to run them.

Another possible use for this would be to run apps and record the screen. Since this is x86 emulation, this should be much faster than the ARM simulator, so this would make really fluid screencasts.

Interesting, thank you.

Yes.

(says the Android dev next to me)

https://groups.google.com/group/android-x86/browse_thread/th...

Is this complete or perfect... perhaps not... but does it work... yes. Probably stamps over some license issues, you're not supposed to have the market on a non-grace of Google device.

Yep, I remember the Archos tablets not having the Market because it wasn't licensed (or something to that effect), but there were some "leaked" Market apks so you could run it. These ran a bit too well to be leaked by a third party, but the point is that you can install the .apks in theory.

I just didn't know if they'd run on an x86 processor, so this is good news.

It's not "leaked", you can download the source code from Google at http://source.android.com/compatibility/index.html It's not licensed for distribution though, so unless someone signs all the license agreements, you'll have to build it yourself to be legal.

Market.apk bundles aren't device specific, so the one you installed was probably just ripped from some different phone/tablet/whatever... no conspiracy theory needed here.

The only hack needed for a decent experience is to either modify your system build.prop to make it look like a device that has real market support, or hack the Market.apk itself to make google's servers think your tablet is some device that it isn't.

If all you did was install the APK by itself, some Archos fan developer must have pre-hacked the market.apk in that way, but doing that is relatively easy and common and doesn't mean Archos had anything to do with it.