Android-x86 as Guest OS

XavierBlak

Renowned Member
Jun 9, 2011
5
0
66
I just spent the evening playing around with getting Android running as a VM and figured I'd share my results.

First I should probably say. Nothing I was able to setup was a perfect setup there are a few bugs on oddities that you'll have to keep in mind. I made use of prebuilt ISO if you wanted to it would probably be possible to get a cleaner solution if to build it from the source.

ISOs:
Android-x86 Project Download page
Android-86 built for VirtualBox

Both these images will boot fine with a default qemu vm. I created a vm with 1gb of storage and 1gb of ram. I'm not sure of the exact requirements but these setting worked fine. To get the mouse working you'll need to set the tablet option to false. This disables the absolute positioning for the mouse pointer which leads to a mouse pointer on the vm that gets out of sync with your mouse pointer. It's annoying but it's the only way I found to get mouse input to work.

The official Android-x86 images lacks any supported network drivers. So you'll be stuck with out any network access.

The image built for VirtualBox adds the driver for an e1000 card. Once you configure your VM to use that it should pick up on DHCP and work with out any configuration. There is an Ethernet menu in android settings if you need to set a static ip.

The one other problem I noticed is that once the display times out the os will crash. You can set the timeout on the official image to never trigger so it's not an issue. The Virtualbox image has a max timeout of 30 minutes so if you haven't interacted with it after 30 minutes it will crash.

That's it. Just wanted to say thanks to the proxmox team for having such an awesome product.
 
After re-reading my post I can see how you might be confused on how this relates to proxmox. It's a little unclear in my explanation but this is how you can use the image provided for virtualbox and get it to run as a qemu vm on proxmox.

But it looks like my second link has has updated and they are now mainly offering ova files which I'm not sure how to get setup. You can get the iso file I used here, http://androvm.org/blog/ex-buildroid/2012/01/25/android-x86-virtualbox-support/.
 

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