Android 9 for PC gets Release Candidate
People who want to run Android Operating System on your PC (without emulation) then one must rely on PC port of the Android done by the community at large. Now this open source project by Android-x86 people has a new release that sports Android 9, albit not fully stable yet and is at Release candidate state.
If everyone was wondering why not the latest Android version then you will be glad to know that up until now the latest stable version was stuck at Android 8. So an Android 9 version is definitely a step up. Further, this port is particularly difficult as these OS are primarily designed for mobile device drivers and have to be adapted for mainline x86 kernels and various drivers for pc components.
This major release has the following changes:
- Support both 64-bit and 32-bit kernel and userspace with latest LTS kernel 4.19.80.
- Support OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for Intel, AMD, Nvidia and QEMU(virgl) by Mesa 19.0.8.
- Support OpenGL ES 3.0 via SwiftShader for software rendering on unsupported GPU devices.
- Support hardware accelerated codecs on devices with Intel HD & G45 graphics family.
- Support secure booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk.
- A text based GUI installer.
- Add theme support to GRUB-EFI.
- Support Multi-touch, Audio, Wifi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only).
- Auto-mount external usb drive and sdcard.
- Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
- Enable ForceDefaultOrientation on devices without known sensors. Portrait apps can run in a landscape device without rotating the screen.
- Support arm arch apps via the native bridge mechanism. (Settings -> Android-x86 options)
- Support to upgrade from non-official releases.
- Add experimental Vulkan support for newer Intel and AMD GPUs. (Boot via Advanced options -> Vulkan support)
- Simulate WiFi adapter by Ethernet to increase app compatibility.
- Mouse integration support for VMs including VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware and Hyper-V.
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