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From The Forums: Neowin member runs Android on Surface Pro

About a month ago, we ran a story where someone had managed to run Mac OS X on Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet. As it turns out, one of our Neowin forum members managed to get Microsoft's Windows 8 Pro tablet to run a version of Google's Android OS, and he uploaded a video to prove it.

Long time Neowin member Sionic Ion (he first joined in 2006) alerted the forum community to his achievement in this post on Wednesday. The video shows that he installed Android OS on a USB drive and basically got Android to boot from the drive via some changes to a boot loader that was originally made for Ubuntu. The Android files were put into the Ubuntu installer.

The video shows that it takes a little while for the Android OS to boot from the USB drive, but once that's done, Android can be run on the Surface Pro. Sionic Ion says the only things that don't work, at least in terms of the hardware, are the WiFi and Bluetooth wireless features. That means you won't be able to surf the Internet on Android's version of the Chrome web browser but for apps that don't require an Internet connection it looks to work pretty well.

It's not likely that most people will be making much use of this Android install method on the Surface Pro, especially with no WiFi, but we still salute Sionic Ion for his work. Maybe someone will figure out how to get the wireless hardware working with the Android OS and then things could get really interesting.

Source: Neowin forums

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