Android VM on a headless server

edited December 2020 in Technical

Hi everyone,

did anyone here ever try to run Android on a server?
Something like android_x86 on a vps or running it in a lxc container on a dedicated server?

To give some context:
I'm playing around with a matrix homeserver, which runs fine and is a lot of fun. Doing that I was also looking into different kind of bridges and got the whatsapp bridge up and running. Seems to be a solid piece of software, works better than I expected.
There is also a description how to setup an android vm to let whatsapp run there and get rid of it on the phone.

Which lead me to the question stated above. Irrespective of the given use case, did anyone ever try something like this?

Comments

  • In theory, since android x86 offers an iso installer, you can install it on kvm if the host offers custom iso.

    In practice, I have never tried it myself.

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  • MasonMason AdministratorOG

    I've never tried this myself, but you should be able to accomplish this using VirtualBox. I use PHPVirtualBox on a headless Linux server at my home for a Windows VM so you should be able to do the same with Android. You use the PHP-powered web interface to create and interact with the VMs. There's VirtualBox images for Android that should work with this setup.

    Some resources:
    PHPVirtualBox - https://github.com/phpvirtualbox/phpvirtualbox
    VirtualBox Android Images - https://www.osboxes.org/android-x86/

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  • @Mason said:
    I've never tried this myself, but you should be able to accomplish this using VirtualBox. I use PHPVirtualBox on a headless Linux server at my home for a Windows VM so you should be able to do the same with Android. You use the PHP-powered web interface to create and interact with the VMs. There's VirtualBox images for Android that should work with this setup.

    Some resources:
    PHPVirtualBox - https://github.com/phpvirtualbox/phpvirtualbox
    VirtualBox Android Images - https://www.osboxes.org/android-x86/

    Is that the same as VirtualBox?

    How heavy is it?

  • MasonMason AdministratorOG

    @Fritz said:

    @Mason said:
    I've never tried this myself, but you should be able to accomplish this using VirtualBox. I use PHPVirtualBox on a headless Linux server at my home for a Windows VM so you should be able to do the same with Android. You use the PHP-powered web interface to create and interact with the VMs. There's VirtualBox images for Android that should work with this setup.

    Some resources:
    PHPVirtualBox - https://github.com/phpvirtualbox/phpvirtualbox
    VirtualBox Android Images - https://www.osboxes.org/android-x86/

    Is that the same as VirtualBox?

    How heavy is it?

    Yes, it's the same as VirtualBox (all that jazz is running on the server), just with the PHP front end rather than the default GUI.

    As far as overhead, it'd be pretty much the same as running vanilla VirtualBox with the only addition being PHP and the webserver (apache or nginx) running alongside.

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  • @Mason said:

    @Fritz said:

    @Mason said:
    I've never tried this myself, but you should be able to accomplish this using VirtualBox. I use PHPVirtualBox on a headless Linux server at my home for a Windows VM so you should be able to do the same with Android. You use the PHP-powered web interface to create and interact with the VMs. There's VirtualBox images for Android that should work with this setup.

    Some resources:
    PHPVirtualBox - https://github.com/phpvirtualbox/phpvirtualbox
    VirtualBox Android Images - https://www.osboxes.org/android-x86/

    Is that the same as VirtualBox?

    How heavy is it?

    Yes, it's the same as VirtualBox (all that jazz is running on the server), just with the PHP front end rather than the default GUI.

    As far as overhead, it'd be pretty much the same as running vanilla VirtualBox with the only addition being PHP and the webserver (apache or nginx) running alongside.

    So...184MB of RAM is needed instead of 128MB? :P

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