ubuntu-tablet team mailing list archive

[Alan Pope <alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mitchell,

On 30/01/12 00:29, Mitchell Reese wrote:
> Wow. So that means then, that after Mark Shuttleworth's announcement
> that Ubuntu is coming to tablets, the 'officially' recommended way at
> the moment to join in with development is to buy a tablet that doesn't
> support, and quite possibly will never reliably support, hardware
> accelerated graphics? I find that disappointing, to say the least.

My recommendation was based on the fact that I know it's possible to run 
Ubuntu on one of these devices. At the moment the Ubuntu Tablet is 
something Canonical are exploring, we don't have a lot of things nailed 
down, including final hardware. The Transformer is good enough right now 
to run Ubuntu, although not perfectly, it's good enough for a 
development target during our explorations.

> What this means is that:
> a. People will be unable to try anything with 12.04 until it's ported to
> this tablet

I don't understand this. People have successfully installed 11.10 on 
Transformers, and had some success with hardware acceleration.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/How_to_install_Ubuntu_on_an_Asus_EEEPad_Transformer

It's far from perfect but people in the community are working on the 
niggling issues by the look of it.

> b. We are then 'stuck' with using the Unity 2D interface. There are
> potentially some great things about this, but personally, I'm a fan of
> the regular version currently shipping that requires graphics acceleration.

Unity 2D uses GL acceleration too you know :) Just less of it. I too 
like Unity, but in Ubuntu both Unity and Unity 2D are first class citizens.

> c. We will most likely be developing using the modified kernel required
> for the transformer tablet. Admittedly I don't know much about kernel
> development, but this doesn't seem to bode well for the future of this
> project. Needing to have a modified kernel to get something to run
> generally points to it not being officially supported by the main
> project...

Modified kernels will almost certainly be required for _any_ ARM based 
device right now. That's a fact of life.

> I would really like to see Canonical, and Ubuntu, succeed in the tablet
> market. For this to happen though, I would expect there to be some form
> of reasonable development device available in the near future. Alan, are
> you able to drop us any hints as to whether this will happen or not? At
> the very least, a roadmap from Canonical about tablet development would
> be appreciated. Thanks.

We don't have a roadmap I can show you. We're just in the early stages 
of exploring the tablet market and devices and have a very small team 
looking at this. As Mark outlined in his blog post we have aspirations 
to be on tablets, but it's very early days for us.

Cheers,
Al.

--
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ubuntu.com/