Install Android OS on PC

Today we will be talking about installing Android operating system on your computer. Before we begin this tutorial, we should mention the software you need to have in order to successfully install Android on your computer. The first software is VirtualBox by Oracle and the other is the .ISO file of Android Live CD. You can download VirtualBox for free from www.virtualbox.org. Simply choose your computer’s configuration and select the version of the program for download. The second file needed for this tutorial is available at http://code.google.com/p/live-android/ where you can click on the download link and select the type of download which suits you the best.

 How to install Android OS on PC

Once you have both files downloaded on your computer, we can start. Open the VirtualBox and choose the name for your virtual machine and the type of the guest operating system you plan to install onto the virtual machine. Choose whichever name of the virtual machine you see fit, but make sure you select Linux under OS Type (under Version choose “Other Linux”) because the Android OS has Linux kernel in it. Next, confirm the recommended base memory size of 256 MB.

Now you are going to need to have a new hard disk to be used as the boot hard disk – you can either create a new one or use an existing. We recommend creating a new one. It is done by clicking on “Create new hard disk”>Next>”Hard disk storage type” where you should choose “fixed-size storage”. You can safely enter the size of 2 GB which should be more than enough and click on next in order to create the new hard disk. After the hard disk has been created, press next to see the summary of the virtual machine you are about to create. If everything displayed is correct, press the finish button.

Now you will have to mount the .iso file on the newly created virtual machine. You can do this in the VirtualBox when you click on Settings>Storage and under “Storage tree” choose the icon called “Empty”. Then, under “Attributes” click the icon right next to the slot CD/DVD Device which will ask you to choose a CD/DVD image. Click “Add” and find the location where you saved your liveandroid .iso file and double-click it. Now it will appear in your CD/DVD Images in the Virtual Media Manager where you will be able to select. When you are back in the Settings of your virtual machine, go to “System” and, under “Motherboard”, uncheck “Enable absolute pointing device”. When you disable this category, only a standard PS/2 mouse will be emulated. Once you have done it, press “OK” to return to the program’s main window.

Now you can click on Start to get the VirtualBox up and running. When you see a message saying that the Virtual machine does not support mouse pointer integration in the current video mode, just click OK and continue until you see the home screen of the Android Live. When another message pops up, click on Capture in order for the Virtual Machine to capture the host mouse pointer and the keyboard which will make them unavailable to other applications running on your host machine.