Developers at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center have been working on a version of Android optimized to run on Intel chips, and this week the team released a major update. Android-4.2.2_r1-ia0 is a preview release designed to run on the same types of desktop, notebook, or tablet PCs you’d normally run Windows on — and there are even tools that let you dual boot Windows 8 and Android on the same computer.

Android on Intel

The latest version also adds support for UEFI Boot, which is important because most Windows 8 computers ship with UEFI instead of BIOS. Unfortunately it looks like the developers have actually gone one step further and dropped support for legacy BIOS altogether, which means you may not be able to run this version of Android on older devices.

That doesn’t mean you can’t run a version of Android on older computers with x86 chips. There’s always the Android-x86 project for that.

But the latest Intel optimizations feature an interactive installer, support for Windows 8 dual boot, and other improvements.

Android-4.2.2_r1-ia0 is based on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and uses a Linux 3.8 kernel.

It’s still a work in progress. Bluetooth doesn’t work, and the software is described as buggy. In other words, while you might want to check it out to see how it runs on your Windows 8 tablet, you might not want to replace Windows with this particular build of Android just yet.

You can find the latest download at the Intel Open Source Technology Center, as well instructions for loading the installer on a USB flash drive and using it to install Android on a PC.

via Phoronix

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7 replies on “Android on Intel now supports UEFI, can dual-boot with Windows 8”

  1. That Intel thinks this is at all desirable or in demand is indicative of a deeper problem there.

  2. Ok… I am sure the Linux community will figure out a way to add back in the removed functionality. Don’t these folks get that there is a need to run one OS across multiple devices old and new (to have the OS adopted by an organization). I get that Intel/MS want you to always buy new ‘n drop old but this seems like its going a bit too far.

  3. How well does this work on Clover Trail devices in terms of working hardware, power management, performance and stability?

    1. It doesn’t according to the Android x86 project, all x86 devices have a normal BIOS and not UEFI, and according to this project all UEFI devices run on x64 so any Clover Trail devices like yours and mine, make both projects useless, I would like one of the projects to attempt support for Clover Trail devices, considering I switched from a android tablet, and the windows store just doesn’t have all of the apps that android did.

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