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Canonical Developing Ubuntu OS For Tablets
snydeq writes "Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, InfoWorld reports. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface, and tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011. The focus will be on developing an OS with a simplified user interface that provides quick access to the most-used applications. Development efforts will also focus on adding on-screen keyboard features and compatibility for multitouch drivers."
AFAIK you can install your own version of Ubuntu onto the Joojoo, which is way cheaper than an iPad but has decent enough hardware specs.. this could be really awesome!
which is totally what she said
What about getting it ON a Tablet? Anybody agreed to or even thinking about putting Ubuntu on their tablet?
I don't see a lot of people wanting to buy a tablet only to replace the existing OS.
Though it'd be nice to get some kind of slate for a cheap price - this should cut down the price by $100, if Ubuntu can get someone on board with it.
When will comapnaies/websites with worldwide audiences wake up and realise that usign terms like 'ready in the winter' is NOT conducive to setting expectations equally? 'Winter' is completely relative to where in the world you are located.
How about using something somewhat universally acepted like '3rd quarter', or even better - state the damned month directly and give youyself an actual target/deadline!
I hope they hire a UI designer who isn't an Apple admirer. We need fresh ideas...
I wonder if anyone over at Canonical is now thinking this:
"Okay, so we're now designing a touch-screen version. Considering how many right-handed people are out there, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to move the window controls to the left-hand side of the screen."
Doesn't seem so ergonomic anymore, now, does it?
No-one gives a shit about tablet computers. Never have.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Unless every app were designed to run in the new constraints, they won't look, work or act right. Netbook spins of Linux are always just menus with large icons that just make you feel like you are playing with a toy with extremely limited options and usability.
Maemo just about got it. Droid definitely got it. Making an "Ubuntu" version would need to be more than a new Window manager and selection of packages. It needs a controlled and contained UI that will work within that environment and integrate well.
This rather leads me to an idea... one that is either really stupid and/or impractical or something else.
If Linux's X apps were created with an application's equivalent of HTML's "CSS" then perhaps applications could be tremendously more adaptable to different user environments.
The iPad is out NOW. Windows tablets will be out SOON. Why be so late to the game? I don't understand the slowness of FOSS to catch Win/Mac.
And the android tablet was out in 2009. I don't understand why the Win/Mac are so slow to catch up...
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
*sigh*
FIRST of all, tablet PC's are over 10 years old.
Second of all, the reason FOSS always seem to be behind Win/Mac is that when there is a FOSS project which is pioneering something, it is usually not advertised and ignored until one of these companies comes along and claims to have invented it. When MS/Apple pioneer something, they spend millions telling the world about it. It then becomes relevant to people that there is a FOSS version of this famous thing.
So, in summary:
FOSS comes first -> not a big deal until the others do it.
Proprietary comes first -> FOSS are lagging behind.
Mmmkay?
--
How much money can Microsoft invest in putting touch drivers into Windows 7? How much money can a company with a fixed six-month release cycle who puts out free software invest? For that matter, how much development time have you invested into making Ubuntu what it is?
Personally I'm just a leach - I barely touch alphas and betas and have only started to participate in the forums and bug reports to help collect information, but I understand full well why my Touchscreen PC works flawlessly under Windows 7 but barely functions under Ubuntu.
On the plus side, I don't think Mac has any idea about how a touchscreen works either so at least Microsoft is ahead of them. It's only the gadgets that Reverend Jobs seems to think are worthy of his efforts.
I'm just dying to see the user interface. If there is any instance when I need to use scroll bars to scroll in any application its insta-fail. Same goes for windows.
Canonical or Google?
Do you see what I did there?
Does anyone remember X11 running a 486-100mhz with 16Meg of memory?
Have you actually measured the performance/overhead of rendering on X11?
Then you suggest Android...
Hmm, why? Xorg uses less than 5MB in all PCs I have.
Again, why? Xorg may currently have many hacks, but it works fine. Linux based OSes were of the first to show desktops as 3D surfaces, and even have real time video playing on them.
Dilbert RSS feed
There has been lots of suggestions but as you can see from my submission it gets downvoted pretty mercilessly on Ubuntu Brainstorm http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23527/
If this is a business device, the killer app is OneNote. Sure tablets dont suit a lot of people, but if you want to take notes, do research, read and link information, be mobile etc... Onenote is it. Evernote is not. (right idea, wrong execution). There are also niche applications (medical etc), but from a general business focus... do Onenote.
If its a consumer device - create an open iPad. BUT you will also need to ensure that Music, Reading, Web browsing, Gaming, Sharing work brilliantly. Only Apple has really succeeded with that, as long as you live in their ecosystem. If you can made those apps work openly **and** get the media providers on board, then you stand a chance.
Including/excluding modules doesn't constitute a kernel fork or a "different version". That's like saying you rolled your own version of Windows by removing the network driver.
I'm not sure why he got modded troll - he's absolutely correct. TFA summary makes it sound like Linux is an operating system.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Linux based OSes were of the first to show desktops as 3D surfaces,
Yeah except for the fact that they weren't. Apple and Microsoft were showing it off before Compiz existed.
and even have real time video playing on them.
That's funny cause my Amiga was doing that before the first revision of the Linux kernel even existed.
Wait why exactly is a scroll bar bad? Given sane restrictions on how small the scroller can be, it offers a pretty decent way of getting directly to any vertical or horizontal location when presented with more information than the computer can handle. Yes obviously gestures can be used for relative scrolling (Scroll up from here, down from here, etc.) - the beauty of a scroll bar is the potential for either the "tap and you're there" functionality often associated with playback position for audio/video, sometimes volume level, etc. - as well as a "tap and you've scrolled a great distance" functionality more familiar to say, a word processor or web browser, allowing you to click or tap in one place and quickly scroll to that place, covering pages at a time, and stopping when it reaches your absolute position. It seems to me that, in the case of viewing a substantially large amount of information, the combination between a scroll bar and a gesture for scrolling would in fact be QUITE powerful.
FOSS is more than that, its primary tangible benfit is that it keeps people safe from being milked for every penny they are worth for everyday software that everyone should get the benefit of. Without it there wouldn't be innovation, know that too.
Linux is a kernel. This means it's part is a dispatch and control mechanism for the operating system as a whole. The complete operating system includes other things such as libraries and utilities to name some. Correct me if I'm wrong?
Shh.
8.04's focus was stability.
9.04's focus was netbooks.
9.10's focus was cloud computing.
10.04's focus was pretty themes (and apparently dyslexia).
10.10's focus is now tablets.
Am I the only one that thinks that a Linux distro should stick with focusing on doing one thing very well? Seems all of these half-baked ideas are just late-night bong-induced dreams that get left at the wayside 6 months later. You just end up getting a bunch of "won't fix" bugs in LP because "the focus is now release+1". /me grows weary of this runaround...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Who really gives a shit if Ubuntu copies Apple? Apple is the market leader in some areas, like UI for example, but their shit is expensive and non-free. They make locked down shit that I would never purchase (for myself) or use. Canonical makes a distribution of a free operating system that anyone can use, and they are steadily trying to improve it. If Canonical can make something to emulate the market leader in UI design, and their product is also FREE, then what is the problem with that? I can't see how that is NOT a good thing for the average person. Apple may not like it because they are trying to make money, but I don't think we should shed any tears over that.
It's not like you have to use this tablet OS, anyway. You can use the standard Ubuntu UI if you choose to. That's the nice thing about having a choice, and choices are something that Apple will never willingly give you if you buy their products. I, personally, don't care for dumbed-down interfaces. I didn't care for the netbook remix on my netbook so I installed full-blown Ubuntu on it. If I ever get a "tablet" (i.e. a regular netbook with a touchscreen, not any of this faggy no-keyboard ipad crap), then I will most likely run regular GNOME or KDE on that as well. For my grandma, sure, I will give her Ubuntu Tablet Edition or an ipad or whatever. She would benefit from the simplistic UI and lack of options to confuse her. It's nice that the option is there for those who want it, but that doesn't mean I have to use it.
FIRST of all, tablet PC's are over 10 years old.
Sure. But what cool technology ever hits the big time on its first birthday?
PCs were around for 15 years before the web sold them to your grandma's friends.
Tablet PCs before the iPad were clunky and slow computers with weird connectivity and someone trying to pump you up for balky character recognition as their greatest feature.
Now they're big-screen smartphones, and everyone wants one.
X11? Pfffft. Some of us quite happily ran X11 on 486s. The problem is not X11.
Any tablet is going to be heavily dependent on proper GPU drivers regardless of what's powering it. Ubuntu has an advantage for being more open and having a wider developer base that also includes power users. The bar is much lower and the community is more interesting.
Hardware that is already supported in Ubuntu has an advantage here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Don't think the business model will work. Let's use the iPad as an example. The OS isn't the expensive part of that product. Apple sells the iPad for $499 with the understanding that the purchaser will likely buy several apps and many movies through iTunes. You put Ubuntu on there, and the user can apt-get to bypass the App store. Same with movies.
The other problem is that tablets are media consumption devices, and Netflix doesn't work on Ubuntu.
Using Linux isn't going to save any hardware manufacturer a significant component cost. And since Android is there for free, there's not a good business argument for bundling Ubuntu.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If this has X11, I doubt it will be especially lightweight.
Er, the Nokia n series including the 770, n8x0 and n900 all use X11. Works fantastically.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Sorry, I don't use garbage like Loonix.
And I don't use garbage like iPads. See how that works? Now get back into your cave, troll.
On my desk I want a big monitor, whereas a tablet computer should be as small as is practical. Where I would put a tablet computer, if anyone sold one for a price that was actually worth paying, is on my coffee table. The laptop I have on it now is clunky to use while lazing on the couch. I expect if ASUS ever get their act together I'll buy one of theirs and install this Ubuntu on it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
MeeGo uses X11, it seems.
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-for-mobile-internet-devices
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 7, 2007 - Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced more details on Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition at Computex 2007 in Taipei.
Well they did invent the graphical user interface, the mp3 player and the smartphone.. oh and they just invented multitasking.
I don't buy the whole thing about Apple being a market leader in UI. I'd say quite the opposite, actually. From phones with touch screens instead of buttons (how do you use it without looking at it?) to laptops that you have to click with two fingers at once instead of just having a two buttons, their products are full of 'features' that do nothing to improve the user experience. Instead, they just look flashy or are simply different for the sake of being different. I find OSX the same, it's full of silly little quirks that make no sense other than to differentiate them from other OSs. Originally a windows user, I found it MUCH easier to find my way around linux operating systems than OSX. I still struggle every time I have to do set something up on a mac.
Obviously Apple are market leaders in a number of areas -- perhaps most notably advertising, but also in making attractive, well constructed hardware etc. For all their faults, I do like the well built feeling of their newer macbook pros. I just don't see that their UI design is anything special at all. For this reason, I'll be interested to see what canonical come up with. Pity it'll probably be based around gnome....
Desktop and server Linux depends on GNU. Embedded Linux does not to nearly the same extent. I tend to use the term GNU/Linux to distinguish desktop-style Linux from the sort of Linux you see on a router appliance.
Orphan Electronics Apad M800 $150-$200 Street Price
http://pricedinchina.com/buy-orphan-iped-mid-slate---m800-wifi-7-android-tablet-pc---m800-iped.aspx
It looks like China already beat everyone including to a degree the Open Source community with a clone of the iPad. They are already selling an iPad clone in China. It looks just like the iPad in everyway, but the guts. I understand it is suppose to have an 600mhz Intel CPU inside, and 2gb of storage with USB port and I thought a memory card. It also has Wifi and web cam built in.
Seems like this thing beats the iPad in almost every area that people complain about for the iPad. Much lower price, same size screen (7"), open and can do all the things the iPad can't or won't. Seems like a pretty good iPad killer to me, and it run Android already so there isn't really an issue of limited apps either. Runs Flash, MKV/H.264, MPEG 1&2, RM/RMBV, MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, AAC,AC3, WAV.
If I were going to buy a tablet computer I would certainly give this one a serious look.
If the screen isn't big enough for you. I have seen other Orphan Electronics tablets advertised with bigger screens, but of course they cost more than this version does.
Here is one with a 10" screen for $290 and has more storage and still uses Android.
http://chinagrabber.com/buy-10-orphan-iped-m16-1024-x-600-android-apad-wifi-tablet-pc-m16-mid.aspx
At $100 retail in China and $150 retail on some web sites. Seems like this is exactly the kind of table that all the Linux companies like Ubuntu should be looking to use as their hardware platform. At the price of $100-$150 it beats even most eBook readers on price, and it has wifi built in so adding more books/music/software isn't an issue, not to mention the USB port on it.
All of your arguments rely on the concept that if something is marketed or pushed onto the population, it should be disqualified from the success race. It ignores that fact that this is exactly why anything would succeed; that and the fact that they made it to an already popular design (the iPhone). It combined two things; a device that already is similar enough to something already used by customers and hype. Apple has succeeded more than any other company in popularizing and selling a tablet. Because of it's popularity, others are now trying to piggy back off Apple's success now that they have paved the way for it with advertising. You really don't have a coherent argument here; at the end of your post you say "see I can do that" and replace Apple with Ubuntu in a quote I had in which I say everyone is now just playing catchup to Apple. The fact is, people aren't playing catch up to Ubuntu, creator of the uPad, so I don't quite understand your point. If Ubuntu and some hardware developer released an extremely successful tablet (let's say Asus built it) and then Apple rushed in with the iPad shortly afterwards, then Ubuntu would have paved the trail.
There may have been other tablets before the iPad, but none of them had such widespread hype. You even agree to this. But seeing as how that is my point, I don't know why you are arguing. Apple hyped up the iPad a lot. Apple sold millions of iPads within months of launch. Now everyone else wants to compete. This is fact. Any other tablets from X years ago are obsolete. They may have seen moderate success when they came out but where are they now and what did they do to really strongarm the market into competing with them? Why didn't Ubuntu come out with a tablet OS then?
Furthermore, Apple is important in the mobile world too. I know other companies are also important and the shift to mobile computing has been going on for a while, but Apple has forced ATT to expand their infrastructure and the iPhone and now iPad userbase has redefined mobile user in the sense that they use the most data out of any smart phone user out their. I know they are singlehandedly redefining mobile computing, but they have managed to strongarm American cellular providers, directly with ATT and by extension the rest of them because of the change in the marketplace. This is a great direction because it means that infrastructures will be built and artificial prices will drop for data transfer in the long run, leading to a world where mobile computing is faster, easier and less expensive in general.