Get some (Android 9.0) Pie on your PC
There’s a pretty solid temptation to consider any PC or laptop that struggles to run the latest Windows operating system as having passed its use-by-date. However, that would needlessly remove the opportunity of putting to work one of the many Linux distros – and there are dozens of them now to choose from. While this usually means everything from Elementary OS to Debian or a lightweight homebrew based on an LXDE desktop, there’s another Linux distro you can now add to the list – Android.
We’ve been keeping tabs on the Android-x86 effort since the early days of Ice Cream Sandwich/4.0. Now the first ‘release candidate’ of Android 9.0/ Pie has arrived, we’ll show you how to install it on an older system and give your old kit a new lease of life.
HOW OLD IS ‘OLDER’?
If you think about it, Android is designed to generally run on hardware-constrained devices, like phones, tablets and TVs, so it doesn’t need 8GB of RAM and 512GB of flash storage to run well. But when it comes to Android-x86 and support for older PC systems, just how old a system can you reasonably get away with using? I have an old Compaq Presario CQ42-136TU notebook I keep for such occasions – 1.9GHz Intel dual-core Celeron T3100 processor and 2GB of RAM. To be honest, I replaced it
