[Acer Iconia A500] gears177:
One of my favorite things about android is being able to duel-boot os's and playing around with Linux distros ,but ive seen a drop off of them being brought to Android sadly :(. so im starting this thread in order to get all the duel-boot,chroot boots and all other ones into one place :) if i forget one please let me now and ill do my best to add it :)

Note these are not all native boots and i take no responsibility for anything that happens to your device, these are not mine either and the owners should be thanked im just bringing them together :victory:

Native Boots

My favorite and best (in my opinion) are the native boots :cool: Starting off is Ubuntu as a native boot :D

UBUNTU

The original creators in bringing Ubuntu to the Acer a500 first are right here on XDA netham45 and sp3dev The original thread can be found here Here

To start off on booting Ubuntu Natively you're going to need Root obviously and acer recovery installer which can be downloaded from the Android market

for the sake of this tutorial ill go over booting it off the internal storage :laugh:

1.Start by making sure you have 8gigs free of internal storage as this is how big the .rar is unpacked

2. after you download acer recovery installer youll need to flash this recovery Here

3. After that download all 3 of these .rar's onto your pc put them in a folder of there own and extract the first one they should all merge giving you one rootfs File1 File2 File3

4.once you get the rootfs move it to the home directory of your internal storage

5. power off your tab and boot into your recovery using power and volume- and your good to go

6.some tweaks you could do would be

For sound

usermod -a -G audio <your username here>

For cpu frequency scale

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:artfwo/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq

it will appear in you task bar on reboot best set to performance

:laugh:

Backtrack

Ive been told it works the same way but replacing the ubuntu.img with the backtrack.img which you can download from

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/

Cannot confirm this if someone tests it please reply back

BODHI LINUX

Bodhi Linux is another Linux brought to android with the dev being here on XDA apapousek Make sure to look at the original thread and thank it Here

There are to differant builds Alpha1 and Alpha2 ill be going over Alpha2 :D

1.Start off by using gparted or any partitioning tool should work, and partion your micro sdcard make the first one as ext4 and make it at least 1.5gb name it bodhi make your second partition 128mb at least of fat32 format

2.mount the partitions

3.download bodhi Linux from Here

4.Extract the bodhi tarball to the root of your micro sdcard by using the commands

sudo su
cd /media/bodhi/
tar -jxvf /home/name/bodhi_alpha2.tar.bz2

5.Copy recovery.img to the second partition and flash it using Acer recovery installer from Here

6.Boot into recovery and you should be good to go :D

7.once booted into bodhi open terminal and type in setupwifi

CHROOT

Not as good in my opinion alot less functionality but there still fun for testing out a Linux distro and require less space without having to sacrifice your recovery:cool:There basically running a virtual machine on top of android to run a Linux distro all the ones I've tried have been slower so i just tend to stay away from them but feel free too XD

First of all there's a couple of different apps that will help you get it installed hassle free (for the most part)

starting off there's Linux installer standard Here

There's also Complete Linux installer with two donate versions available Here

Manual Method

There's also a more manual way of setting up chroot.

1.Make sure you have a terminal emulator Here 7zip Here and a .img file for a linux distro ill put up backtrack since it seems to work well make sure you get the ARM version of Backtrack And finally Android VNC Here

2.Download the .Img file of your choice in this case Backtrack 5 and extract it once this is done you will get another folder with bt5.img.gz and a whole other bunch files right click on the bt5.img.gz and go to extract here now copy them all into a folder called BT5

3.copy the folder called BT5 to the internal storage of your device it will be around 5gigs

4.Make sure you have Root access and busybox installed

5.Now open up your terminal emulator app and type in

su
cd/sdcard/BT5

Then hit enter and type in

sh bootbt

You should see root@localhost if it worked :P if it did then you can go ahead and use BT5 commands or you can get a gui by typing in.

tightvncserver -geometry 1280x800
Hit enter then type in
export USER=root
hit enter then
vncpasswd

Now its going to ask you for a password just create any random one and then verify it . After that it will ask you if you want to create a view only password hit n

6.Finally open VNC android you'll have nickname which doesn't matter port which is usually 5901 if that doesn't work try 5902 or 5903 address leave bank and make sure your connected to root@localhost..now just hit connect :D and your done one final thing to remember though is when you want to exit you have to go back to terminal and type in exit to shutdown :cool:

WINDOWS

WINDOWS95

windows is actually run through an app which emulates it i believe it has little to none drivers instaled and you cant really do much that ive found but its fun to mess around with and show off :laugh: to get this up and running is pretty simple all you have to do is.

1.Download this .rar HERE

2.Extract the folder to get a sdl.apk and a folder called sdcard move both of them to the root of your sdcard

3install the .apk and open it :) when shutting down though you have shutdown the right way by hiiting shutdown if you dont on reboot youll get a scandisk error

WINDOWS XP

Windows xp is even slower more useless and way more complicated to run BUT its still kinda cool to have :p

1.First you'll want to download everything you'll need bochs for android from HERE Sdl.zip from HERE Bochs for pc from HERE and Qumu manager for pc HERE. Last thing you will need is a windows xp.iso file not .img but .iso (ide post one but i read somewhere its ilegal to post .iso for windows :/ )

2.Download and install boch's for android on your tablet then move the SDL.zip to the root of your SDcard

3.Install Boch's and Qemu manager onto your pc

4. what you going to need to do is run a virtual machine with the .iso you have so first thing you'll want to do is once you install Boch's for your pc hit the start button then go to all programs and find the Boch's folder inside of that folder there should be a program called Disk image creation tool.

5. Next type in hd then hit enter, after that type in flat then hit enter ten after that its telling you what size you want it to be usually windows xp doesnt need more than 1.5gb so type in 1500 and hit enter then finally type in c.img and hit enter.

6. Now you want to open Qemu, once inside Qemu you want to start a new virtual machine do this by going to the vm tab and click on new virtual machine.

7.you can give it any nickname it doesnt matter just give it one and hit next.

8.Now it wants to know how much ram you want to allocate to this virtual machine 512mb to 1gb is usually fine :) pick and hit next.

9. Then hit finish now what you want to do is install the .iso to the blank image file but you need to specify what it is so go to the drives tab, click on Harddisk zero.

10.now you have to find the file c.img its usually located in program files/bochs you might have to make sure all files is selected in your file type bar.

11.Select thec.img file and hit ok

12. Now you want to click on your cd-rom that is your windows xp.iso file so browse and find your windows xp.iso and click ok.

13.Now your ready to run your virtual machine just hit the run button (green one) and if everything went alright you should see it start to boot up.

14. Now you'll have some on screen prompts make sure you follow them and choose ntfs file system when it prompts you to. (process will take 30min+ depending on computer speed)

15. Once your installation has been completed and your at the desktop you want to stop virtual machine. click yes end session. (i know right all that time just to spend two seconds in it)

16.Now you want to find the c.img file which is no longer blank and has windows xp installed to it. Usually in program files/bochs copy it then paste it inside the folder called sdl on your sdcard. If there is already a c.img inside of it just overwrite it.

17.okay almost done (i promise :p) your going to want to copy all this code

megs: 256
cpu: count=1, ips=6000000, reset_on_triple_fault=1, ignore_bad_msrs=1
# filename of ROM images
romimage: file=BIOS-bochs-latest
vgaromimage: file=VGABIOS-lgpl-latest
vga: extension=cirrus, update_freq=25
pci: enabled=1, chipset=i440fx, slot1=cirrus
ata0: enabled=1, ioaddr1=0x1f0, ioaddr2=0x3f0, irq=14
ata1: enabled=1, ioaddr1=0x170, ioaddr2=0x370, irq=15
ata0-master: type=disk, path="c.img"
#ata0-slave: type=disk, path="d.img"
#ata1-master: type=disk, mode=vvfat, path=/sdcard/HDD, journal=vvfat.redolog
#type=cdrom, path="CD.ISO", status=inserted
boot: c
config_interface: textconfig
#display_library: x
# other choices: win32 sdl wx carbon amigaos beos macintosh nogui rfb term svga
log: bochsout.txt
sb16: enabled=1
mouse: enabled=1
sb16: wavemode=1, dmatimer=500000
clock: sync=none, time0=1

Now go to your sdcard/and go the sdl folder and find the bochssrc.txt file overwrite everything in that file with the lines of code you just copied :)

The megs value at the top is how much ram you want to allocate to windows xp

18 Save te text document and your ready to run windows xp just open up bochs on your phone :)

Miscellaneous

These are all the os's that ive found that have been duel booted but are not worth it or a tutuoriol was never released will update it as i find them.

so far the only one i know of is Armedslack thsnks to hellvy from what i know of its the same way as bodhi linux but using armedslack packages :)

MAC OS

Im trying to figure out old mac os and newer ones right now ill be righting a tut once i get it figured out