I was reading through my feeds, I and came across a post on eeepc.itrunsonlinux.com about a version of Android built for the Intel platform that is provided as a live CD/ISO image that you can download and install on your netbook.  The installer is very bare bones, but you can install this not only in it’s own partition, but also into any current ext3 file system just in case you don’t want to repartition your Linux box.  You can even install it on a fat32 partition, although you will not be able to install applications.  

I, of course, just had to try it, and as much as I like Android on a phone, I am not quite sure it’s ready for a desktop.  First, the good.  The Browser is so fast it is instant.  I have never seen the browser in Android as fast as it is on my netbook.  Wifi worked out of the box, and there were a lot of good things about Android on Intel.

Now the bad.  First, it was obvious that this was really screaming to be installed on a tablet.  The interface was not tweaked at all for a mouse, and it really begged to be touched.  Also, the Android Marketplace was not installed, and I could not get some of the apps I really wanted installed.  I probably could, and I probably will install them by directly downloading the install packages, but this is a pain.  The phone pieces are all still in the image and are pretty useless as well.  Then there is the fact that the install I have does not have any of the Google Experience pieces that make it so useful.

Finally, since Flash has not been ported to Android on any architecture, you still can’t view flash content in the Android browser.

With that said, it has come along way in a short year that Android has been out.  The kernel and the underlying architecture pretty much works, and it’s mostly programming and interface design that need to happen to make Android more usable on a non touch screen device.  For those with a touch screen, it’s still not there since Flash isn’t available for Android.  Stick to regular Linux distros or Windows.