~Toughbooktalk~

hi .. i have an old CF-27E with the touchscreen which so far i have upgraded the RAM from 64 to max 192 and i managed to get windows xp installed even with no CD drive (98 upgrade) .. all is working well i'm just bored with it .. XP does not make a good native touch screen environment .. yesterday i found Android x86 and am now going to attempt to make it work on my CF-27E just for fun.

issue 1 - no cdrom drive .. the CF-27 will unfortunately not boot from USB so external CD drive or thumb-stick is a no go.

issue 2 - no idea what i'm in for , will anything work? touchscreen etc .. i might attempt to install android inside vmware or virtualbox before going further to see what happens.

to do the actual install i'm thinking i'm going to take the hdd out of the CF-27 and put it in another laptop i have and swap back once install is done or doesn't need disc anymore ..



where can i get a cd drive for the cf-27 which is cheap ? .. anyone know any good linux builds that are meant for touchscreen in case this android doesn't pan out ?

i will update this as i go in case anyone cares .. any suggestions \ comments etc are welcome ..

Cruise Ebay for the CD/ caddy. They can usually be found complete for about $60, or less if you are patient. I think Rob still has some for sale cheap too (around $40 IIRC). If that is out of budget range for a CF_27 project, then the route that you already mentioned to put the hard drive in another machine sounds like the best bet.

Jeff is our resident Linux tinkerer. He swears by Ubuntu 10.04 for CF-29 and 28. I haven't personally had the time to play with it myself (or Linux at all in quite a while actually) nor am I aware of anyone installing as "low" as a 27, but it sounds like a good place to start.

This Andoid x86 sounds really interesting though. I would be curious to see how it goes.

If ya have a floppy drive you can use PlopLinux on the floppy and boot anything from the USB ...even USB 1. I have not done this on 27 but have done it on CF-28, CF-29 MK1,2,CF-51A,B. Good web site ...lots of stuff.
http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux.html

cool , thanks for plop linux link .. i'm going to try the boot manager tonight .. i couldn't get android to load on virtualbox , crashs half way through the install or the booting of the live disc , only looked into it a little as to why with not much success.. i got android to load on another laptop with the same settings .. thanks again for the ideas!!

I have messed with Android X86 some, touch screen worked out of the box with my CF-T5 dual core, but didn't with my CF-29. I have had too many projects going on to get back to it to get it all worked out, You can dual boot with it and that is what I had planned for it.

Talk to Jeff, he has become the Linux Pro and has been very successful at getting the Tough screen fully functional on the CF-29 under Mint and Ubuntu, this is just another form of Linux...

nothing to report , had to put this on back burner .. also ended up getting a super cheap pandigital novel ereader that hacks nicely into a decent android tablet so that's satisfied my android tinkering nicely for now :] ..

still would like to get this to work so i will be back!