I’ve been thinking for a while it might be an interesting experiment to get Android running on my netbook. Amazingly, it was incredibly simple, thanks to a bit of ‘net research and the Android x86 project.

Sam Cater’s Android on your netbook post covers all the basics of downloading the software and preparing a USB stick to boot it (using UNetbootin). Depending on your hardware, you may find that you need a different version – I couldn’t get the Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) RC to work on my Lenovo S10e, for instance, but a deprecated generic version of Froyo (Android 2.2) seemed to boot with no issues.

It doesn’t even seem to matter that there is no touch support in my chosen hardware – the mouse and keyboard seemed to do the job for me. It will need some more work for me to get Wi-Fi into action (this thread might help) but, for now, I’m happy that 10 minutes on the ‘net (and that’s all it was – 15 at the most) found a use for an old USB stick and gave me a chance to have a play.