If you are someone who runs Android on your laptop or desktop, you may have heard of the Android-x86 project. For those who haven’t, the Android-x86 program is an initiative by volunteer developers to port over and run Android onto desktops and laptops running on AMD or Intel processors.
After pushing out Android 6.0 Marshmallow in June, the Android-x86 project has pushed out the second Release Candidate of Android 6.0 to the public. This RC2 build is based on the Marshmallow MR2 release from AOSP, along with all security patches.
Here’s a look at the key features:
- Launch the Android-x86 Analytics Program to collect anonymous data from users.
- Update kernel to 4.4.17 with more upstream patches.
- Update Mesa to 12.0.1. The unstable issues of i965/i915/Nvidia GPUs found in 6.0-rc1 are fixed.
- Fix software rendering crashing issues on VM like QEMU and VirtualBox.
- Fix modules auto loading method to improve hardware compatibility.
- Improve audio hal sound card selection.
- Auto-mount USB/sdcard with ext4/ntfs/exfat/vfat filesystems.
- Add back SDCARD=xxx function to vold 3.0.
- RTC time is set to local.
The RC2 release can be found here, with images for both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. These images can be booted from both BIOS and UEFI firmware. You can also load the images to create bootable USB sticks.
There are a few known issues to the release. Specifically, the Skylake GPU’s may have render issues on the built-in browser app. Also, the suspend and resume functions do not work on some devices, so your mileage may vary.
If you are looking to get Android onto a desktop system, Android-86 presents a good starting choice amongst others. And now you get the goodness of Marshmallow and updated security patches too.
What are your thoughts on this RC2 build from the Android-x86 project? Have you tried out the build? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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