Android-x1 86 RC9.0 comes with Linux 4.19, multi-touch and more

The Android-x86 project developers released The release of the first release candidate (RC) of what will be the new version of your system which will be based on Android 9 (android-9.0.0_r53). This new build they released includes fixes and additions that improve Android's performance on the x86 architecture, as well as added support.

For those who are still unaware of the project, I can tell you that Android-x86 is an unofficial initiative to the mobile operating system Android of Google to run on devices with x86 processors from AMD and Intel, instead of ARM RISC chips.

Main new features of Android x86 9 RC1

With the presentation of this first Android 9 Release Candidate of the project,s developers highlight various points of the work carried out.

Uno of the main points the ones they focused on was delivering support for 64-bit and 32-bit builds coming with Linux kernel 4.19 and user space components.

On the graphic side, we can find what is proposed for the management of these controllers Table 19.348 to support OpenGL ES 3.x with hardware graphics acceleration for Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs, as well as QEMU (virgl) virtual machines.

Also Port for hardware accelerated codecs for Intel HD and G45 graphics chips is highlightedIn addition, SwiftShader is used to render software with OpenGL ES 3.0 for unsupported video subsystems.

Regarding the interface, an alternative is provided for programs using the taskbar with a classic application menu, the ability to secure shortcuts to frequently used programs and the list that shows recently launched applications;

Programs designed for portrait mode of operation can be displayed correctly on devices with a horizontal screen without rotating the device.

Another important change in this new version is the ability to boot into UEFI systems and the ability to install to disk when using UEFI, plus it sand added support for bootloader themes in GRUB-EFI.

On the other hand, the addition of the support for multi-touch, sound cards, Wifi, Bluetooth, sensors, cameras, ethernet (DHCP setting) together with the ability to simulate a wireless adapter when working over Ethernet (for compatibility with Wi-Fi linked applications), as well as automatic mounting of external USB drives and SD cards.

Of the other changes that we can find in this RC1:

• The presence of an interactive installer that works in text mode.
• Support for multimode FreeForm to provide simultaneous work with multiple applications. Possibility of arbitrary positioning and scaling of windows on the screen.
• The ForceDefaultOrientation option is enabled to manually configure the screen orientation on devices without an appropriate sensor.
• The ability to run applications built for the ARM platform in the x86 environment through the use of a special layer.
• Support for unofficial release updates.
• Experimental support for the Vulkan graphics API for the new Intel and AMD GPUs
• Mouse support at startup on VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware, and Hyper-V virtual machines.

Download and test Android x86 9 RC1

In order to download this RC1 from the system they can go directly to the official website of the project in which in your download section you can find the image of the system.The link is this.

The universal live versions of Android-x86 9 for x86 32-bit architectures are approximately 706 Mb, while for the x86_64 architecture it is 922 Mb. These images are suitable for use on standard laptops and tablets.

You can save the image with the help of Etcher on a USB.

In addition, rpm packages have been prepared to install the Android environment on Linux distributions, from which you can get from the link below.

The installation is done like any normal package either with a package manager or from the terminal with:

sudo rpm -Uvh android-x86-9.0-r1.x86_64.rpm

Or in the case of those who use Debian, Ubuntu or any other derivative of these, they can install the RPM package using alien.

sudo apt install alien
sudo alien -ci android-x86-9.0-r1.x86_64.rpm

Finally, if you want to know more about the details of the announcement of this first preliminary version, you can consult the following link.