The first alpha release of Remix OS 2.0 – which we talked about a few days ago – is now officially released. It’s clearly an alpha, though, so don’t try to use this on any important machines. I have been unable to get it to work – I just get “checking media fail” upon boot – but others are reporting it works, so I guess your mileage may vary.
That being said – I’d be a little weary of the EULA. It seems like it contains some regular Chinese boilerplate stuff (other Chinese companies are using the same boilerplate stuff, such as Xiaomi), which sounds incredibly heavy-handed to us. Not sure what to make of this just yet – maybe the company will clarify this one.
This is a laptop that I purchased several years ago, exactly because it was booting Ubuntu flawlessly. However, I also got this error, and never got beyond this. On a freshly created VM, it seems to boot further, but on the “breathing” Remix OS logo, it seems to stay stucked there forever.
I got the same result on VirtualBox. It got stuck on the logo.
All my laptops are 32 bits so I am out of luck to test it on real hardware
is what concerns me as well, actually remixos is a closed source os from china. If they release sources it would be ok to use, but not this way. There could be (and most likely is) anything in there…
if they release sources, then you may need to trust them the downloadable binaries are built exactly from those sources and the compiler don’t do nasty things.
Of you build the sources yourself, using one of the open source compilers…
This can be done if the sources are actually buildable (you may have the sources, but they require proprietary tools to be built or lack some components) and if the hardware accepts an unsigned boot.
Okay I tried to find it to download.
Where is it?
I ran if from a USB on my Intel 13-2350m laptop. It worked okay but didn’t really do anything useful. It wouldn’t run on Virtualbox.
Their USB install tool didn’t see any of my USB drives, so I first tried Rufus to copy over the ISO, didn’t boot. Then I just used Win32DiskImager to image it onto a drive, that worked and made a bootable drive but it didn’t get past GRUB on some machines, and on the ones it did, it never finished booting. It also got stuck at GRUB on VirtualBox.
Oh well, it is an alpha release after all…
Honestly… I don´t find it too different from EULAs from several other companies. It´s just that those don´t seem to be questioned because they are not chinese.
And about this being closed source from China… with all that´s come out related to Snowden, USA and European and Australian agencies collaborating on data mining, even going as far back as Echelon… is a chinese project any less trustworthy than any other one? really?
Depends on who you are and what you do.
If you are doing something that the US government doesn’t like, this might be better.
If you are doing something that that Chinese government doesn’t like and you or your loved ones are In China, this would be worse.
I’m of the opinion that the US tolerates more stuff, and the consequences of getting on its bad side are usually not as bad, assuming it has nothing to do with Islamic Terrorism and you’re outside the country.
Honestly, the EULA is such a big wall of text in legalese, the natural reaction to it is TL;DR
I haven’t been able to run Remix OS but there is something that bug me…. The size of the installation disk.
Jide are explaining that they built Remix OS 2.0- by adding to the functionalities needed to run on Android on a desktop (menu, multi windows, multi-user?) to Android-x86. I would expect Remix OS 2.0 to be larger than Android-x86 but not a lot of larger.
Android-x86 installation iso (Android 5.1rc1) is 350MB, there largest disk is 450MB. Remix-OS is over 2GB.
What did they put in it to justify such an increase in size?
You must have a VERY corrupted download there, the file size of my download is 692mb. It also states that on the download site!
That’s the zip. The system.img, when expanded, is much larger.
Ahh OK. Thought there was a big difference there. My bad.
It’s a bit weird that the Remix OS site keeps banging on about a USB stick and doesn’t mention running it in a VM at all (which is probably what most people would want to do first, if just for security reasons).
I find it does install in the latest VirtualBox, but it’s a 64-bit OS and will not work if you select it as a 32-bit Linux in VirtualBox. I had real problems controlling the mouse properly – it seemed to get stuck in a rectangular area on the left until I made a lot of mouse movements to get it out of there.
Didn’t see the Play Store on there, but I suspect there’s a way to get it on. It’s an alternative to Bluestacks I guess, plus you don’t need Windows, which is always a good thing 🙂
Most people don’t know anything about virtualization but do know what USB sticks are.
I think people who are trying to run an alpha build of a brand new OS have are likely to have heard of virtualization.
First knee-jerk reaction – where is the terminal?
Also, what kind of site are they referring to in the licence? Is this thing running a desktop in a web browser or something?
Edited 2016-01-13 14:05 UTC
It’s customized Android. Install a Terminal app from the Google Play store.
There isn’t any Google Play available.
Maybe it’s only on the official Remix. I have a Remix Mini that I use as a Media device for my television. Some apps don’t support Chromecast, so this let’s me use any app, such as Tennis TV. It makes sense that the downloadable wouldn’t have the Play Store, as it is device specific.
According to a post on their comments section, this works to boot in Virtualbox:
When you saw your selection screen where you select guest mode or resident mode. press tab key and you will see a whole command(parameter), add a space in the end of command and then write vga=791 or vga=781. then press enter. it will work this way. it takes around 10 to 15 min to boot.
EDIT: Oh, and don’t forget to set 64 bit Linux as the guest, it won’t work as 32.
Will try it myself shortly.
Edited 2016-01-13 15:25 UTC
It boots and runs for me in Virtualbox using the vga=791 at the end of the command. It has no mouse pointer though, so is useless as nothing can be selected. It looks nothing special though, better off sticking with a normal Linux distro.
i had the same problem. deactivating mouse integration in Input menu solved the problem.
FYI: Over at Hackernews user javipas wrote the following:
Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve written about this in Xataka (http://www.xataka.com/servicios/remix-os-promete-pero-su-licencia-d…), where I work as editor, and after getting in contact with Jide’s team they’ve let us known that these terms apply only to China and that they will update the EULA:
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. In full disclosure, we utilized the language (relevant to China and China only) and copied it over to the EULA for our international ROM. Our legal team has now reviewed this and has removed all language pertaining to legal and moral rights of the data as well as anything that mentions the Chinese government as this is not relevant to non-Chinese users. This is a very serious matter and will be corrected in all future releases of the EULA.”
So, I was able to get it to run using an 8GB USB flash drive and a Dell OptiPlex 380. If I run it in residential mode its very slow and unusable. Apps will constantly time out prompting an “unresponsive” message. I can run it in guest mode just fine and everything is relatively quick, however the problem there is that loading certain apps (browser for instance) will produce some very bad graphical problems. The app’s window will be completely garbled and broken and the only way to close the app at that point is through the task bar. I’m wondering if it might be my flash drive, its only a 10mbps write speed when they recommend 20mbps write speed. I might try with a better flash drive later to see if that makes a difference.
Its also worth noting that I couldn’t find the Google Play Store app at all. When I click the ‘start’ button or go into Settings > Applications its not listed in the installed apps. Also, I wasn’t able to log in with my google account. Going to Settings > Accounts and clicking Add Account does nothing. These experiences were true for both Residential and Guest modes.
Seems to work fine with VMWare Fusion and I was able to install a few apps too. Definitely an alpha build and I found the whole experience fairly mundane, but it does work!
I wrote a review:
http://osg33x.blogspot.nl/2016/01/review-remixos-alpha-1-for-pc.htm…
Conclusion: interesting project, but no fat lady singing and no cigar yet.
The USBTool doesn’t check the correct filesystem of the external storage.
It can’t BOOT if the external storage is formatted as NTFS or exFAT.
By formatting the storage to FAT32 ( via some additional tools available on the internet ) and then use the featured USBTOOL I could BOOT and run.
Might get tried in a VM, but not on anything real.
Looks interesting. Running Ubuntu at the moment for my Linux needs (not many) and Raspbian,