How to dual boot android on thinkpad tablet 2

[Nitinjs]

According to following article we can boot android on UEFI devices:

http://liliputing.com/2013/03/android-on-intel-now-supports-uefi-can-dual-boot-with-windows-8.html

Is there any step by step guide on how to do this on TPT2?

[Nitinjs]

Want to install android x86 on TPT2

http://www.android-x86.org/

[justtib · Accepted solution]

Im not sure. I was looking into this myself a few days back, what I came to know was that the TP2 utilises the Clover Trail (different to Clover Trail+) CPU architecture which has no support for linux due to licences of using PowerVR's SGX gpu chip(as they dont currently support linux, i.e. no video drivers).

Along with that, Clover Trail uses powersaving features similar to those on ARM cpus (most android devices), problem is, these must be OS supported else they won't be used, in other words; battery life will be terrible under linux, and may (pure speculation, zero basis) damage the device, or at very least shorten life expectancy.

Now what does any of this have to do with android? Well, Android is based on Linux, so all problems are directly inherited. But most of these problems are already fixed in android, since for starters ARM almost always uses PowerVR SGX chips, but this is ARM andoid, which is made by Google and is NOT open source. Android-IA and Android-x86 are open source initiatives to get android working on Intel/AMD or non-ARM cpus, amd in it these projects only contain code from android which is open source (unlike the Powervr gpu driver for instance) so they one, do not contain 'binary-blobs' or non-sourced code, and two cannot include them because the code is written to run only on ARM cpus...

All that aside, it  entirely is possible, but you'll probably only see a command line/laggy OS at most :/. Theres a few posts on the XDA Devolpers forums, try there.

Hope this helped. 

Sent from my ThinkPad Tablet 2.

[Nitinjs]

does this also mean => not possible to run Ubuntu on TPT2?

[justtib]

I don't know. I've been trying my hand at it and so far I've only been able to get to the GRUB boot loader, which is good, but its not linux.

I've been following this tutorial:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/392719/32-bit-uefi-boot-support

I'm not that experienced with Linux, and dual-booting but I'm starting to think maybe its not just due to the fact the gpu has no drivers and the power state has no support. Perhaps Intel deliberately programed the CPU to not run any Linux code

[justtib]

I'll give you an update on my current progress:

After a bit more searching I found some forum posts liking to a Linux distro with 32bit UEFI support.

http://galerie.kanotix.de/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-27547.html

Once again I've managed to get into grub on this one, but when loading the firmware I also expreince the same issues as the user in that forum post. Maybe this is what was happening with Ubuntu for me. Regardless, I have no clue what to do from here on out.

[Nitinjs]

I have bricked my TPT2 trying to install android/ubuntu.....

Before this....

Installed [Bluestacks] inside windows... too slow
Installed [Windroy]... too slow

I hope some day there will be support for running android apps natively on windows OS

[justtib]

Thats bad news to hear. If its under warranty send it in, else you could atways try to fix it yourself...

As for me, I'll keep trying with Linux Live CDs distros and see if I've gotten anything.