The following exchange was had in the #osm IRC channel and we thought it might be helpful to put it here in case anyone else needs the info.
It is a brief outline of the steps needed to run OsmAnd via android-x86 on GNU/Linux using qemu.
[18:23] <joepie91_> 1. download http://sourceforge.net/projects/android-x86/files/Release%204.4/android-x86-4.4-RC2.iso/download
[18:24] <joepie91_> 2. qemu-img create -f qcow2 osmand.img 50G
[18:24] <joepie91_> (it's a sparse file, size doesn't matter)
[18:24] <joepie91_> 3. qemu-kvm -soundhw es1370 -net nic -net user -hda osmand.img -vga qxl -m 512 -cdrom /path/to/android-x86-4.4-RC2.iso
[18:25] <joepie91_> 4. install android-x86, follow instructions, single primary partition, ext3, install grub, blah blah blah
[18:25] <joepie91_> 5. run same command without -cdrom parameter
[18:25] <joepie91_> 6. go to google play, install osmand, you're done
[18:26] <joepie91_> (must have QEMU-KVM and virt support, obv)
[18:26] <joepie91_> Linux
[18:26] <joepie91_> openSUSE in my case, but as long as you have qemu-kvm it'll work
[18:26] <joepie91_> (package to install on openSUSE may be either `kvm` or `qemu-kvm` depending on what repo you install it from, it seems - `qemu-kvm` is used by the virtualization buildservice repo, but I think the main distro repo uses `kvm` still)
[18:27] <joepie91_> (on debian, it's supposedly `qemu-kvm`)
[18:27] <joepie91_> anyway, thanks to friend of mine who walked me through this :P
[18:27] <joepie91_> it's not the fastest, but it's very usable, even if mouse control on android is still a little awkward
While joepie91_ was doing his GNU/Linux based install, simonpoole_ tested using OsmAnd on android-x86 on Windows 7 using VirtualBox and he reported it worked fine but slow and he had a lot of RAM and an SSD