Ever since Honeycomb and later on with the Asus Transformer, I’ve believed that Android will eventually be destined for the laptop form factor as well. Google clearly tried to make the Honeycomb/ICS UI more desktop-like, even though they could’ve gone more towards something like WebOS or perhaps a completely different direction. But they didn’t, and I believe that’s because they also want it to be optimized or the desktop one day.
But other than giving it this UI, Google hasn’t done a whole lot for this, other than partnering with Intel to make Android optimized for their Atom chips as well. But in the same time, there have been other folks who were working on this Android-x86 project, that wanted to make Android work on any x86 machine, no matter if powered by Intel’s higher performance chips (which actually Intel didn’t like) or by AMD chips.
For now, since Android 4.0 was already pretty optimized for Atom chips, this Android 4.0-x86 version should work mainly on Atom netbooks. It’s still a RC1 version (just before become stable and after beta), but it should work pretty well. You mainly just have to download the Android ISO, make a bootable usb drive like you normally would with Linux, and boot your netbook with it to install it. You can find all the installation instructions at the following site: MobileFun.uk.