Method 1: Burning your Live CD
Step 1 – Download the two parts of the Live CD .iso file from the LiveAndroid web page.
Step 2 – Combine the two segments into a single one using a specialized application (the projects' authors recommend HJSplit for the task).
Step 3 – Burn the resulting .iso image onto a blank CD using your favorite disc burning application.
Step 4 – Reboot your computer (make sure that the CD-ROM drive is placed ahead of the HDD in the list of boot devices).
Step 5 – Wait for it to load (getting past the Android Live CD splash screen might take a while) and then voila! You've gotten the Google Android operating system running without any problems on your computer.
Method 2: Running the Android OS on a virtual machine on your computer
While this second method is a bit more difficult than the first one, it's also a lot more rewarding, since it will allow you to run your other applications at the same time as the Android.
The first thing you'll have to do is install a virtual machine application, if you don't have one already installed. For example, we opted here for the Sun VirtualBox, simply because it provides networking support without forcing us to tinker further with the settings and the command prompt.
Furthermore, you'll also have to install an optical drive software emulator in order to get the LiveCD running within the virtual machine (of course, that depends on the virtual machine you're using. For VirtualBox, you won't need such an option, but for others, you might - thanks for pointing that out, Maldoror). We used the Daemon Tools Lite application for this purpose, but you can easily choose your own.
So, here are the steps that you must follow in order to run the Android from your own computer directly. These are roughly general steps, but we're pretty sure you'll get the hang of it quite fast.
Step 1 – Download the two parts of the Live CD .iso file from the Android web page (link provided above).
Step 2 – Combine the two segments into a single one using a specialized application (the projects' authors recommend HJSplit for the task).
Step 3 – Download and install the virtualization software.
Step 4 – Download and install the CD/DVD emulator.
Step 5 – Mount the LiveCD image into the CD/DVD emulator.
Step 6 – Create a new virtual machine using the virtualization software (it's a good idea to allocate at least 256MB of RAM for this machine, while HDD space is not that important, but it should have at least a couple of hundreds of MB).
Step 7 – Inside the virtualization software, select the virtual drive on which the LiveCD image has been mounted as the boot drive.
Step 8 – Start the virtual machine.