Live Android - Android on the Desktop

[kevglass]

Live Android is a bootable CD of android to run on the desktop. Lovely jubbly!

http://code.google.com/p/live-android/

I installed it on a virtual box tonight and it's really very very good. Can't get SD card support working yet, so no custom app, but it gives those without the luxury of a phone a chance to play.

Screenshots of the virtual box install:

http://www.cokeandcode.com/android/liveandroid1.png
http://www.cokeandcode.com/android/liveandroid2.png
http://www.cokeandcode.com/android/liveandroid3.png

Another interesting one, looks like SD card support is in the next release

Kev

[kevglass]

Yay, and it can run apps too

http://www.cokeandcode.com/android/liveandroid4-app.png

Considerbly quickly and more useable than the emulator.

Kev

[Ranger]

Makes me wonder why Acer is going to all the effort:  http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/30/acer-reaffirms-that-android-based-netbook-still-coming-in-q3/

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[brackeen]

Interesting. How is app-loading compared to the emulator? I'm working on an app that takes way-too-long to load it onto the official emulator.

[kevglass]

Problem I'm seeing with app loading at the moment is the only way seems to be download them into the right directory using "wget", which is fine once it's available somewhere.

I'm thinking the best bet at the moment would be to run a webserver in the dev environment, make your build output to it's webroot and then hit enter on the android box to download the app.

Actually starting/running the app the performance is astounding in virtual box, way way faster than that of the emulator. My (rather small) app is instant start. Booting the machine takes less than two seconds on my pretty average desktop machine in virtual box.

The other nice thing about this approach is you've got full control over the box to play with setting etc without the emulator's clunkyness getting in the way.

Kev

[h3ckboy]

Makes me wonder why Acer is going to all the effort:  http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/30/acer-reaffirms-that-android-based-netbook-still-coming-in-q3/

hehe engadget rules.

ontopic: I may try this out.

[Nate]

This sounds awesome, but hangs at the splash screen. Tried giving it more system and video memory, tried a bunch of settings, nada.

Edit: Sigh... nevermind...
http://code.google.com/p/live-android/issues/detail?id=25
I blame Google Code's crappy download page! :p

[kevglass]

Did you virtual machine have a network - apparantly that lacking can cause hangs

Kev

[Nate]

'Twas my own stupidity.

Played around a bit. Pretty neat. Go my game running, but without an SD card it isn't playable. Briefly tried loading some song files from the APK that are normally loaded from the SD card but when it didn't work right away I stopped.

What we really need is hot swap. Deploying to the phone to test each change is too cumbersome, even if it wasn't terribly slow (which it is). I find I am much more productive by developing a desktop version of my game, then shoehorning it on to the phone. Any idea if they are ever going to give us hot swap?

[kevglass]

No idea, there's some details on the web site but it's mostly early days for live android.

Kev