How to install libhoudini on a custom Android x86 rig

Question

I'm currently making a custom built Android Marshmallow x86 64 on a mini PC. I've successfully installed the Android and now I'm trying to install libhoudini on the rig so that it can play ARM apps and games (porting the apps to x86 is not possible since they are 3rd party apps). How do I install and use it? When I go to its Github repo, it only has links with .sfs files in it. And also there is no documentation or tutorial whatsoever about how to install and use it.

Answer 1

So I've actually managed to find a pretty new tutorial about this and I've successfully installed and used libhoudini on my rig.

The newest Android-x86 isos from http://www.android-x86.org actually have a bash script executable that will help us install libhoudini. So these are the steps:

• Enable this option: Settings>Apps Compatibility>Enable Native Bridge
• Go to the Android console (Alt-F1 or install a terminal emulator)
• Login as super user / root
• Run /system/bin/enable_nativebridge

NOTE: If you look at the script itself, you will see that the script will try to download the needed file if your device doesn't have one. But there's a chance that the server of the file will be down and the wget will loop indefinitely. If that's the case, this is what you have to do:

• Download the appropriate houdini.sfs from https://github.com/rrrfff/libhoudini
• Move / copy houdini.sfs to /system/etc
• Go to the Android console (Alt-F1 or install a terminal emulator)
• Run /system/bin/uname, if it says x86-64, rename houdini.sfs to houdini64.sfs
• Run /system/bin/enable_nativebridge

I hope it helps anyone who wants to run ARM apps on an Android-x86 using libhoudini. Cheers.

Answer 2

The first answer from @Bawenang is very helpful, but unfortunately the http://goo.gl links in the enable_nativebridge script are now forwarded to HTTPS by Google.

wget on android-x86 does not understand SSL, therefore the download fails.

A workaround is to edit the script and insert a proper link, e.g. the ones from this page are quite easy to type:

https://github.com/Rprop/libhoudini

In the script you only have to replace one of the URLs, e.g. for x86, replace the one that is preceded by v=7x or v=8x.