How to natively install Remix OS for PC

Hardware Hub Phones, Tablets, & Wearables
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At CES this year we saw Jide showing off Remix OS for PC which they released a few weeks back as an open Alpha. After 2 weeks of fiddling I managed to get an optimal, natively installed, configuration and decided I’d make my first YouTube video.

Text guide below.

Pre-requisites:
An Intel laptop/tablet, desktop, or NUC with either switching graphics or no discrete graphics at all. Sorry AMD fans got no dice for you here.
Two USB’s one with your favourite Linux Distro on it (I used Mint 17.3) and the other with Remix OS configured using their included image writer. Jide says you should only use USB3.0 drives with their boot environment but USB2.0 works fine so long as it’s of decent quality. And we’re installing not running the live environment so it’s not an issue at all.

The nitty gritty:

  1. Boot into the live Linux disk and create an ext4 partition. You will likely need to resize an existing partition to make room for this one which is why we’re using a live disk, however if you’re installing this on a drive separate to your Linux OS drive then you can just work from there. For the resizing and partition creation I used GParted but you can use any partition management software you want. You’ll want to make a note of the /dev/sdXX for your partition for step 3.

  2. Now that we have a partition set up we can reboot into the Remix OS drive. At this point you want to hit tab and edit the default entry by adding INSTALL=1 DEBUG= on the end of the existing boot entry.

  3. Once it boots up you’ll need to select the partition to install too. This is why you need to make a note of the /dev/sdXX ID of your drive as there’s very little feedback here to help you identify each partition.

  4. Next it will ask you if you want to format the drive, select no. And skip through the grub install options you don’t need them and make sure /system is read write enabled. Now just wait for the installer to finish and reboot.

  5. You’ll now want to boot into your distro to edit the grub config. You can either directly edit the /etc/grub.d/40_custom config file or use Grub Customizer. With my primary laptop you see in the video I edited the file but with the laptop I used for the demo the file didn’t exist which was weird sooo yeah fun. I’ve put the config up on pastebin Remix OS Grub Config Entry - Pastebin.com you’ll need to put in your partitions UUID and numeric references for the partition based on your /dev/sdXX that we made a note of earlier.

  6. Once edited don’t forget to run update-grub or equivalent. And you’re ready to rumble.

Guides are already out on XDA for installing the Play Store so I won’t go through that.

Anyway hope someone finds this helpful. I know I enjoyed working on it so I hope someone else enjoys it as well.