If you've been curious about Google Android but aren't up for a) dropping the cash to buy an actual mobile device to run it on or b) hacking the existing codebase to make it run on your notebook, someone's just saved you a lot of trouble. Welcome to the first Android live CD.</p>

Serdar Yegulalp, Contributor

July 17, 2009

1 Min Read

If you've been curious about Google Android but aren't up for a) dropping the cash to buy an actual mobile device to run it on or b) hacking the existing codebase to make it run on your notebook, someone's just saved you a lot of trouble. Welcome to the first Android live CD.

They call it LiveAndroid, and it's hosted right on Google's own code.google.com site. Boot it and you'll go right to a live version of Android tailored to run on the x86 platform, although be warned that a great many things simply don't work yet. The system itself isn't terribly stable, either -- partly due to Android not being designed for the x86 platform to begin with.

There's a lot of work ahead. The current 0.2 version doesn't even have wireless networking yet (although wired networks are okay if your network card is recognized), and there's very little that's possible on the system by anyone's definition of a "production environment". But the first steps have been taken.

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Serdar Yegulalp

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