Android-x86 4.3 bugs...

[LSS]

At least on my ASUS M2V computer my hard drives are now accessible in 4.3 so I am able to install it onto a hard disk partiton. (One thing to worry though, that I don't know if it is possible to install GRUB on the target partition rather than the MBR as I am using another boot loader on that disk that I don't want to be overwritten)

However, upon boot, a "Google Play Services" FC appears and on that computer, it gradually reboots and eventually ends up to a black screen. It did not happen in 4.2 as everything looks fine including my sound card (Audigy 2 ZS), although the IDE/SATA controller modules for my chipset were not present before 4.3...

It seems my ethernet adapter (Atheros L1) is working on this version as it seems to be able to sync time online, but it appears that the kernel uses UTC which as a result the system adjusted my hardware clock to 8 hours earlier. (As my time zone is UTC+8, the hardware clock is the same regardless of time zone in UTC AFAIK)

I don't know how Android works but the Android-x86's using UTC breaks a lot of things outside Android-x86 as I have to readjust the hardware clock when booting to Windows or another operating system there, or I'll not be able to realize this issue until a serious time-related error occurs on that other operating system...

[Terry Poulin]

Expecting UTC is rather traditional / standard in the unix and linux worlds, it's just customary to ask users if the hardware clock is UTC or not -- as a courtesy to those dual booting with Windows.

AFAIK the installer can only install GRUB to the partition being used if it's installed at all. In my case, I've an ultrabook with dual 64GB SSDs and have Ubuntu's GRUB2 install on sda chainload the GRUB install for Android on sdb. As opposed to translating the menu.lst or whatever to the new style.

[LSS]

I am aware of that UTC is used widely in unix/linux... but dual-booting with Windows and other non-UTC aware OSes while one of the OS is using UTC can be a trouble as one will have to actively change the hardware back and forth from UTC when entering different OS.

You mean it only installs GRUB to the partition being used? I want to be sure that, if I install Android-x86 to a partition sda3 will GRUB be installed to sda3, not sda, so I can use the bootloader installed on sda to load GRUB on sda3 and enter Android-x86?

Anyway, I perhaps will have to wait for a later, more polished build as this 4.3 build is rather unstable compared to 4.2.

[sol64]

Windows is able to deal with the RTC being in UTC with a simple registry fix. It is recommended to configure Windows to use UTC, rather than Linux to use localtime.

re: http://lifehacker.com/5742148/fix-windows-clock-issues-when-dual+booting-with-os-x

[Terry Poulin]

The way it works is like this:

Android is installed to ${partition}/android-..../. This is basically a data folder, a system folder or .sfs (squashed file system) file, kernel, and ramdisks.

Grub is installed to ${partition}/grub/ and execute grub with the grub command `"setup (hd$d) (hd$d,$p)`. So grub should be installed to the hard drive (sda) and the files to (sda3). Bare in mind this is old GRUB not new GRUB (2); http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/legacy/grub.html#setup

You only need to install GRUB if you're going to give over your MBR. Otherwise just configure whatever bootloader you're using.

My system uses GRUB2 in first disk and chainloads Android-x86's GRUB because I lazy.