Android-x86 based on Android 8.1 Oreo now available for your PC

Android x86 is an unofficial attempt at porting Google’s Android OS from Smartphones over to the Personal Computer. Although there are numerous ways to have the Android experience through notebooks and PCs, Android-x86 is free of any form of emulator-spam and/or advertisements creeping into the native experience.

The project is completely open-source and has been designed to run on computers with the “x86” architecture, which is basically devices with Intel chips. Android-x86 has now received an update, bumping the project up to the 8.1-rc1 release which brings Android 8.1 Oreo to the users. Based on the latest Android 8.1 Oreo MR1 release (8.1.0_r33), 8.1-rc1 includes the following features:

Support for both 64-bit and 32-bit kernels and user-spaces has been added.

This release supports OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for Intel/AMD/Nvidia, VMWare and QEMU(virgl) by Mesa 18.1.2.

For unsupported GPU devices, OpenGL ES 2.0 is now supported via SwiftShader for software rendering.

For devices with Intel HD and the G45 graphics family, hardware accelerated codecs are now supported.

A text-based GUI Installer has been added.

Secure booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk is now supported.

Theme support to GRUB-EFI has now been added as well.

Multi-touch, Audio, WiFi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only) are supported as well.

External USB Drive and SDCard support have also been added to this release.

Taskbar, an alternative launcher (which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of the screen of the user) has been added to the release.

For devices which lack known sensors, ForceDefaultOrientation has been enabled which lets portrait apps run in devices with landscape orientation without having the user rotate the screen.

ARM Arch apps are now supported via the native bridge mechanism. The option is available at the “Android-x86 options” menu inside Settings.

Although this release is fairly stable, there are two known issues:

Google Play Services might crash at times on 32-bit images.

For some devices, “suspend” and “resume” features don’t work.

Hit the link below to read the full release notes and find the pre-built images.