ubuntu-tablet team mailing list archive

[Chris Billington <billington.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Agreed, avoid Nvidia Tegra. Based on my experience with the Toshiba AC100
'Tegra2 Netbook', where a buggy alpha graphics driver was followed six
months later by a buggy beta, NVidia (worldwide sales $billions) could not
give a hoot about Linux support. Allegedly it's due to 'resource issues'-
all they care about is Android. Their history of keeping drivers
proprietary is well known.

Note that there are two Arm build architectures, armel and armhf (which
supports the on chip FPU). Ubuntu and other Debian distributions are moving
to armhf. Nvidia have not publicly released any Linux graphics drivers for
armhf, and may not even do so. Same situation for Flash and Skype, neither
is ever likely to arrive. Gnash plugin works on some sites, though in the
end I removed it as being too memory-hungry. Note that while a full Ubuntu
distribution (Unity 2D, etc) will run in 512MB RAM, it's often
memory-constrained. Better to choose a device with 1GB.

At the moment the Archos G9 tablets based on OMAP4 seem to be the best bet.
However, it's not clear whether they have 1GB RAM from the specs, delivery
is erratic, and some reviews show quality problems with the screen on the
8" version.  However they are very keenly priced. Battery life on Intel
Atom units I saw is poor, and the big batteries make them heavy and clunky.

Chris


On 28 January 2012 22:19, Mitchell Reese <mitchell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Just had a quick squiz, and while the transformer prime seems like it
> sports an unlocked bootloader, the only way I found to get Ubuntu running
> was through a chroot. I really don't recommend using this method for a dev
> device. I think we need something natively installed, without android, or
> we're going to be stuck within the limitations of a vnc viewing program.
>
>