Netbook Scoop

There is a lot of development work on new operating systems for netbooks.  Obviously, Microsoft intends to replace XP with the soon-to-be-released Windows 7.  They will make the transition gradually.  But, they will phase out XP as soon as customers let them.

However, there are others who would like to insert themselves into the mix and grab a portion of the market.

So, we decided to spend time this weekend exploring Moblin (initially developed by Intel), Android (from Google), Kubuntu (from Canonical) and Windows 7 (from Microsoft).  All of these are pre-production releases, so we expect some buginess.

Steve just posted an article on how to create a Live USB Stick to boot Moblin.

In this article, I do the same for Google’s Android.

Preparation

First off.  Please realize that Android was developed as a smart phone operating system.  Then some smart guys decided to load the OS on their Eee PC – and surprise, it actually worked.  Sort of.

Since then, there has been a lot of speculation that Google would expand and extend Android as a real netbook operating system.  Last month, Google suprised many people by announcing that they would be introducing a netbook operating system named Chrome OS.

Unfortunately, Chrome OS is not available to us.  But Android is – and many speculate that Chrome OS will simply be Android with some netbook extensions.  So we will take a look at Android.

The first thing we did was to make a bootable USB memory stick containing Android.  We thought you might like to experiment with Android as well, so here is how we did it.

All you need is a USB memory stick.  I used a 1 GB stick.  You can probably fit it on a 250MB stick.

Step 1.  Download the latest version from Google.

Go to the live-android download page at Google.  Download these two files:  liveandroidv0.2usb.iso.001 and liveandroidv0.2usb.iso.002.

Each of these files is about 90 MB.

Step 2. Join the two files

In Linux:

cat liveandroidv0.2usb.iso.001 liveandroidv0.2usb.iso.002 > liveandroidv0.2.iso

In Windows:

You will need to access the command line (Start Button -> Run -> CMD), then:

copy /b liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 +liveandroidv0.2.iso.002 liveandroidv0.2.iso

Step 3. Make the USB stick bootable

Whether you are using Linux or Windows, you will want to download and install UNetbootin.

Plug your USB stick in and fire up UNetbootin.

Screenshot of UNetbootin

Set the DiskImage field to the file you created in Step 2 above. Set the USB Drive to the one you just plugged in. Select OK.

Ready to Test

Now you just need to set the BIOS on your netbook so that it will boot from the USB stick and you are ready to go.

We will publish our results in a separate article once we have some time to evaluate it.

We also plan to shoot a video showing different netbooks running each of the OS’s mentioned above.  So stay tuned.