This one is dedicated for installation by people with linux-knowhow on general public, the unwashed masses, your grandma's, your dad's, etc. Ever wanted to revive and old machine and tried one of those lightweight linux distros, like Lubuntu? It's neat to be able to make an old piece of silicon be useful again, but at the cost of usability, user friendlyness and aesthetics.
Last week I downloaded Jide's RemixOS. It's some sort of x86 Android with some tweaks to make it usable on a desktop with mouse and keyboard. It comes with a familiar desktop for windows users, and with a few clicks you can add all google play services and play store if you want to. Keyboard shortcuts, functional window manager and desktop are quite good.
I've installed it on My trusty tank laptop, an old mac mini and this piece of crap and they all run great. The U100 struggles to play HD youtube or any kind of video on VLC for android, but It's enough for music playback, light browsing and basic office stuff.
The idea of the OS at the moment is just to run it from a persistent USB drive, although with some tinkering I managed to install easily on BIOS based machines (T60 and U100). UEFI (mac mini) is a crapshoot and had to install ubuntu first in order to have a working bootloader I could edit later.
Installation/Usage:
Super easy n00b method (requires windows) (UEFI/BIOS):
When you download the zip file includes an exe utility to create the usb media or even installation to your hard drive (without formatting). This one is the easiest methodEasy Method (BIOS):
Download the zip from jide, grab the iso inside and dd it to a spare drive (msdos partition table, check gparted)
sudo dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdX1Medium Method (UEFI) (requires another USB drive with ubuntu-based distro):
a. Grab a usb drive, open Gparted and create a new GPT partition table, create 1 single partition and format it as ext4
b. DD the ISO to said drive (not the partition but the drive, i.e. dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdX )
c. Boot your linux usb of your choosing, and select manual partitioning, leave a reasonable space for the linux, and the rest leave it for /home
d. After linux installed correctly, boot it once and then reboot with the RemixUSB
e. on the boot menu, press e to edit the resident mode boot entry and on the line berfore initrd, remove from the end everything up to "showlogo" and write INSTALL=1
f. On the (ugly) setup screen, select the partition you made for /home, press enter, and DON't FORMAT
g. When asked to install grub select skip, again select skip when prompted to install GRUB2efi
h. Select "yes" on making /system read-write and wait till it finishes
i. Reboot (without usb) back to linux
j. Install grub-customizer
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer
k. Open grub-customizer, create a new entry with "Other" type and add this
insmod gzio
insmod part_gpt
insmod ext_2
set root='(hd1,gptX)'
linux /android-2016-07-12/kernel
root=/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=remix_x86_64
androidboot.selinux=permissive SRC=/android-2016-07-12
initrd /android-2016-07-12/initrd.imgRemember to change the set root= line accordingly. you can do this by changing on grub-customizer to show grub menu, and when booting press C to get the GRUB> prompt. type "ls" to get a list of disks and partitions.
l. Save that entry, go to the general options tab on grub-customizer and enable the menu for 5-10 seconds. This can be later changed to boot directly on Remix or show the menu only for 1-2 seconds so you can access linux if needed.
m. Apply changes and reboot
o. Boot to RemixOS, do the intro wizard, and open Remix Central to get apps
p. (optional) On Remix Central find Google Services Installer, download it, run it and press on "Install Google Services". After it's done it'll say to reboot BUT WAIT. Open the configuration app and select the Applications sections, go through every "Google services" app there and clear cache/data berfore rebooting
q. After rebooting you'll have a working play store, just need to add gmail account details to be able to access store, youtube and so on.
Well, this was somewhat long to write but if everything goes right you'll do it in less than 20 minutes. I hope you techno-necromancers out there find this info useful, and by extension you'll have family members gladly using a fast and friendly linux-based OS instead of the default crap that barely runs now on their machines.