Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Psyched to get Android running on my old eee pc 701 (4g surf). Now I just need a text editor that can edit HUGE text files.

The whole reason for the netbook is to have a way to work on my novels on-the-go but a full OS on the eee is either too clunky (XP), too slow (XP also), too big (Vista) or I run into compatibility issues with the apps I want to run (Linux). But Android (FroYo!) is really light on the eee's tiny resources and can do what I need it to. And doesn't that Android logo look good on the eee?

The lockscreen is just one example of quite a few points at which I wish I had a touchscreen. It's really hard to swipe with just a track pad! But it's WAY easier to type with a REAL keyboard, so it's a trade off.

I even got this build running on my Mac via Parallels.

The build I used, btw, is froyo-eeepc-20101015.iso and was found at http://code.google.com/p/android-x86

I found that via http://android-x86.org. (be sure to use that dash!)

It was a breeze to get it up and running, too! I used Parallels to boot the ISO and then installed it onto a 16GB SD card I had pre- partitioned with two FAT32 partitions--1 was 2GB and the other 14. I formatted the 2GB partition to ext2 for the OS and the system sees the other partition as the external SD card. Pretty sweet! Sadly there is no access to the official Android Market though it does have another market (AndMarket it's called). Also it's pretty easy to install from apk files manually.

One minor drawback is that the wifi doesn't reconnect after you close the display. Not a huge deal but still not perfect. Also the camera app keeps crashing and mp4 playback is choppy. Still, if I can find a good text editor I'll have all my bases covered.

I'm actually kind of astounded that I got FroYo on my old eee 701 so easily!

Posted via email from thepete's posterous

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