I posted this in the Linux section because people that have installed custom roms on there phones might have a better idea on what to do than the windows guys.
Now what exactly I'm trying to do is install windows 8.1 on a Motorola Atrix HD (AT&T). I know there has gotta be a way to do it. I figured that if I flashed to a bootloader that can install an .ISO from a bootable drive than it will be a simple as creating a bootable drive out of my SD card that will go through the windows installer. Is there a bootloader out there that can do this?
Or do you guys have an alternative way to do it? Or is it simply impossible?
I don't know why I didn't check what it had before but I just checked and it has an ARMv7-A Krait that I believe is a x86-32 bit architecture. I really am not sure though, I'm not familiar with mobile CPU's.
Any of the major linux distros has an ARM version. You need root access to install it. You can install linux in a chroot with a linux install application from the appstore, it's really simple.
There us also the likes of tizen, although I don't know its current progress. And sailfish but I believe it is not public yet. Very much looking forward to sailfish.
I went and used one of these installers. The issue is I want a full replacement for android. And these programs set it up so you can run it as a virtual machine. although I found this incredibly cool its not the droid I was looking for. Im going to look into the Ubuntu mobile and, I don't know but maybe I can get my hands on Firefox os?
There doesn't appear to be a full Ubuntu OS for mobile devices. They have there "Ubuntu for android" and it works but you MUST be docked in order to use the desktop. in other words its useless to me
Looking into both of those OS's, Tizen looks so lame and is to close to android. However SailFish OS looks amazing! I will find a way to get my hands on it!
A phone is different from a PC, in that it is a SoC PC on top of a proprietary communications ASIC. The ASIC provides all of the communications functionality, and there is no open source mobile communications ASIC. The ASIC is also called the "radio" and the firmware/operating system of that ASIC is also called the "baseband". The problem is that the baseband is the most important functional software in a smartphone. ARM processors are often relatively open source designs, but that doesn't mean that you can just pack any operating system on them, because you have to have a baseband, which is always closed source. Full linux distros will not engage into producing basebands until open source hardware designs come out, and the large carriers are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening.
As far as the SoC goes, you can use linux in a chroot with almost the same performance as you would have running linux natively. That is because the operating system of the smartphone uses the linux kernel, and a chroot will also just use that same linux kernel. The Android operating system itself uses an abstraction layer, Dalvik or ART, to run a Java environment on top of that linux kernel, but you can still access the linux backline directly from terminal.
In the near future, full virtualization will also be possible on Android phones. Xen 4.4 for ARM is almost finished. That will allow you to install any operating system (for ARM, so anything except Windows), onto your phone and run it with minimal overhead.
But why would you even want to run a desktop OS on a phone? Android offers so much possibilities already, you can even develop right on your phone, run SDR's from it, run USB oscilloscopes from it, emulate consoles on it, etc... you don't HAVE to use Google Mobile Apps, you can use Android without Google enthrallware.
why would you want windows on your phone ? there is currently nothing interesting on that platform. And also it's from Microsoft, there's bound to be some BS in the future, that company fucked with desktop-users for decades. I certainly see no appeal in giving them a chance to bully people on their phones too.
I would take a look at sailfish if yo want to something else than android.
