Brilliant illustration of Bowie by http://helengreenillustration.com

Ugh. Awoke to more sad news… the passing of music icon, legend, artistic genius David Bowie. I was not a huge Bowie fan. But I certainly respected him and his incredible longevity in the business. 😦

I’ve been playing around with RemixOS. I’m very excited about the possibility of running Android on some of my older PCs. So far however, all the attempts to install, or even simply just booting the OS have failed. I’m hoping the official BETA release from Remix tomorrow is better. Wait and see I guess. Hugely disappointing so far… the installer is brutal.

UPDATE 01

Well the official Alpha was release today by Jide. And it is garbage. I have two PCs and followed the instructions to the letter. (Really just burning an ISO… big deal) And neither system will boot the OS let alone INSTALL the OS. I was really excited to see Android on PC. They say it is intended for older PCs but clearly don’t support enough of the architecture to make it work. Both PCs are stuck in boot loops. I tried both USB and CD installs with both Guest and Resident installs. Absolutely nothing worked or even got to the loading screen. FFS….

Also trying to download PhoenixOS. But the download keeps timing out or erroring so… can’t even test that version. It is another Android variation.

>UPDATE 02

Finally downloaded this. LOlZZzzz. The ‘installer’ is in Chinese. I tried an existing USB installer. It of course didn’t work at all. Don’t waste your time with this. Clearly I’m not meant to play with Android on PC.

The actual android-x86 .ISO gets the farthest but still fails to install. This version at least as a detailed instruction page. It hangs at the android screen. I’ll stick with trying this version. If I get anywhere I’ll update this entry.

The 5.1 install is what I was initially trying. It was the build giving me all the problems. So… Now trying the 4.4 build and I’ve got it to the Android Loading screen. After a good 15 or so minutes loading Guest mode from DVD…. It seems to be working! Well sort of… I finally have a screen and mouse control, but that is about it. Oh wait…. more loading…. more of the OS is slowly emerging. This is unusable but at least I may finally get a look at the OS!

The real issue is the installer NEVER properly detects my hard drives. I’ve tried SATA and IDE… nothing seems to work. Hmmpt.

UPDATE 03

Finally. IT’S ALIVE!

After hours of rebooting, reinstalling, refortmating, reburning and restarting… finally got a version of Android to boot. I’m now running Android x86’s 4.4.4 version of Android! Yes it come with google apps. Wifi works. Play store works – sort of – it is really slow and somewhat unresponsive. I’m not sure why. Going to reboot to ensure this isn’t running in memory.

I’m not really sure what I did differently? I reburned the 4.4.4 .ISO to my USB (the same USB that failed on the same computer before?!). The only difference was I added a small FAT32 partition (it’s about 16G) and I believe it used it to install… but now it is detecting all the drives. So… I’m not entirely sure why it is suddenly working but I’m going to play with it a bit and update again! Very cool. The display is really nice and full screen. My USB mouse/USB keyboard work fine. Yaye!

UPDATE 04

Woo! It is an installed version of Android! Also my ethernet connection also suddenly started working so Google Play is now working as expected! Weeee! Android on my PC! Good-bye Windows!

UPDATE 05

I know it says in a lot of places to install as FAT or FAT32… but I found that it does NOT use the whole partition space if you do. I had barely 560M of space. I reformatted with ext3 (linux) and now the internal storage uses the FULL partition of 16G! 😀

UPDATE 06

Huh. Well… Remix released new versions of their OS. One is the legacy image the other the EFI image. Don’t bother with the torrents… both downloaded and were corrupt. However! I finally got a version of remix to boot! I’m now looking at remixOS for the first time. The legacy image/guest mode did boot. More on this later. It really looks like an OS created for a PC, not a OS that runs on a PC. More after I play with it for a bit. The UI is certainly sharp looking.

Wow. Sabres won a game. Reinhart with a hat trick! Have to mention Kane passing to Reinhart for the goal that gave him his hat trick. You know Kane wanted to score and shut up the ‘Peg fans but he unselfishly passed to Sam. Kane scored more points with his team than can be imagined I’m sure.