How To Run Android on Your Home PC with Virtualbox

Google’s Android OS has been making consistent progress in the smartphone world. If you’re anything like me, you may have been curious about this mobile OS but not willing to spend much on a phone. Fortunately, the LiveAndroid project on Google Code provides a bootable LiveCD image that can be run on your home computer. With the free virtualization program VirtualBox, we can try it out on Windows, Linux or Mac without even burning a CD.

Getting Android

While it’s true that the needed files are available on the Google Code project page, I’d recommend downloading with this torrent link instead. This is because the project page has the ISO file split into two parts that you’d have to manually join together. That torrent is the same files, pre-joined by Yours Truly for convenience. It’s about 173MB. The torrent is new so until I have some other seeders, it may be a little slow.

Preparing VirtualBox

With that downloads, Windows, Linux, and Mac users can all get their system’s version of VirtualBox here. Follow the website’s instructions to install, and start the program. Once ready, you should have something like this:



Choose New in the top left corner. After hitting Next, you’ll be taken to the first config screen where you can enter the information as shown in the screenshot below.



The Name field can, of course, be anything you like.

The next step on the following page is to set Base Memory Size. Go ahead and leave this at the default. On the page after that, you’ll be presented with an option to boot a hard disk. Since we’ll be running solely from the live image, a hard drive image is unnecessary so go ahead and remove the checkbox leaving that page blank, as shown below.



VirtualBox may give you a warning about no hard drives, but that’s ok for what we want to do. Ignore the warning, and hit Finish on the final page. This should take you back to the main screen, but this time it’ll show LiveAndroid 0.3 in the left pane.

Booting LiveAndroid

Before you click Start, we have to tell VirtualBox to boot from the LiveAndroid file. If it has finished downloading, click the Settings button in VirtualBox. Choose CD/DVD Rom on the left. With the config screen open, check the box for Mount CD/DVD Drive and ISO Image File. You can click the folder icon to choose the downloaded ISO file, as shown here.



When finished click OK and you should be returned to the main screen, but this time it should show liveandroidv0.3.iso under the CD/DVD ROM section in the right hand panel.

If all is well and good, you can now hit Start and boot into your very own local Android OS.



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