installing Androind on Early A1181 Macbooks

[Padso]

We have a load of these old macbooks in our school that are all still working great but the software is sadly beginning to show its age. I think the highest MacOS we have got running on them is Yosemite and it doesnt work great.

We have managed to successfully get Cloudready working on them and it works adequately with just 2GB and an 80GB hard disk drive but has anyone managed to find and install a copy of Android on these old macbooks?

It would be great to get some Android apps running from the play store which sadly Cloudready removed from their image.

 

[Amethyst1]

Android-x86
PhoenixOS
PrimeOS

These are the x86 distributions of Android I'm aware of. No idea how well they'll run on a MacBook.

 

[velocityg4]

Not sure but Android tends to use a lot of RAM. I’d think it would run poorly. I’d stick with a lightweight Linux distro.

 

[theMarble]

Not sure but Android tends to use a lot of RAM. I’d think it would run poorly. I’d stick with a lightweight Linux distro.

Linux Mint is a good distro for beginners, and is lightweight aswell.

Running Android-x86 will be a hassle to say the least.

 

[Slartibart]

If running Android apps is what you want - you can try the archon-runtime with Cloudready. Beware that only some apps are currently supported.

 

[Padso]

I had a play about with this today and got the Prime OS 32bit classic software working on the a1181 MacBook EMC 21** range.

It actually works and runs fine with just 2gb and 80gb HDD. The android OS itself uses around 750mb ram in general running conditions. I was able to install netflix, ms office, Facebook apps etc with no issues. Videos and streaming play fine too with no stuttering.

We were able to take this image, copy it to our servers and deploy it onto similar machines with success too.

It's definitely much better than running some old MacOS software with outdated browsers etc and really gives it a new lease of life.

However this software won't run properly on the newer models like EMC 22** and EMC 23** ranges. I'm going to have to do some figuring out why this won't run correctly.

 

[Padso]

Update...

Its now running on the A1181 EMC 2300 and 2330

As well as EMC 2121 and 2139

However it will not work on the EMC 2200 and 2242 models where its in some sort of boot loop with an emergency remount error message.

It also will not run on the EMC 2092 model due to the apple boot selector not detecting the USB to boot. I might be wrong but im not sure these work with USB boot devices?

 

[Amethyst1]

Just for reference because I can’t remember EMC numbers:

EMC 2092 = MacBook1,1
EMC 21xx = MacBook2,1
EMC 2200 = MacBook3,1
EMC 2242 = MacBook4,1
EMC 2300 = MacBook5,2
EMC 2330 = MacBook5,2