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Ubuntu Powered Tablet Spotted!
dkd903 writes "The year 2010 had been all buzz with tablets and a similar trend is expected during the year 2011 too. We have already seen a lot of Android powered tablets. But how does a tablet powered by Ubuntu sound? A Chinese manufacturer TENQ has launched a tablet called P07. The device is said to be running Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and the boot time reported to be almost instant."
Surely 2011 will be the Year of the Linux Tablet now?
Google has a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:h8oRGG22slsJ:gadgetizor.com/the-tablet-season-brings-a-new-ubuntu-powered-tablet/6304/+http://gadgetizor.com/the-tablet-season-brings-a-new-ubuntu-powered-tablet/6304/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Uh, what? This is based in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, with big buttons and multi-touch support. This is not the desktop edition.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
GO to ebay, search Tablet PC. Pick one.
Download Ubuntu 10.10
Install Ubuntu 10.10 on the tablet.
Magical poof happens with a bright brown genie appearing and angels singing.... you have a ubuntu tablet! Something that nobody ever though of....
Granted, Tablet PC's have been around for decades, and running Linux on them has been happening for decades.... Ignore that.
Fujitsu stylistic works great, plus I can use a stylus so I can use it as a writing tablet. Too bad there is not a OS replacement for MSFT One Note.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1995: Year of the Linux server has arrived!
Linux people: Come on, year of the Linux desktop any time now!
2000: Year of the Linux wireless router has arrived!
Linux people: Come on, year of the Linux desktop any time now!
2008: Year of the open-source browser has arrived!
Linux people: Come on, year of the Linux desktop any time now!
2009: Year of the Linux smartphone has arrived!
Linux people: Come on, year of the Linux desktop any time now!
2011: Year of the Linux tablet and cloud desktop has arrived!
Linux people: Come on, year of the Linux desktop any time now!
2043: Year of the Linux mind-machine interface, interplanetary spaceship and household robot. The Windows source code has been wikileaked six times, and it is statistically impossible for Microsoft suing someone giving away their own fork of Windows to get a jury of people all 12 of which are willing to enforce copyright law, so Windows is de facto open source.
Linux people: No, all that is insignificant! Windows is still winning on the desktop! Come on, year of the Linux desktop already!
It was probably hosted on one of those Ubuntu-powered tablets.
the iPad is cool not because it can read email but the app store. all kinds of apps that do things that were unimagined a few years ago.
i'm looking at an ipad next year because there are apps for kids that even out the cost between buying crap like leapfrog. there are apps to get kids to learn to read
There will never be a "year of linux desktop" same as how there was never a "year of firefox web browser". You'll know it has happened when everyone has it.
I've got Ubuntu 10.10 on my Thinkpad X200 Tablet. It works pretty well, but not everything works perfectly. I've had every version of Ubuntu on it since 9.04, and some of the earlier ones actually seemed to work a little better. There are still a few kinks, though. Thankfully, sites like ThinkWiki exist to help with some of the problems.
I'm still having a few issues, though, such as the fingerprint scanner not working or when rotating the screen, the touch sensor doesn't translate its coordinates properly (so left-right becomes up-down when the screen is rotated 90 degrees). The mute button doesn't work properly either, but other than that it runs pretty well.
The year of the Linux desktop could have been 2009 around the time of netbooks. However OEM's mucked it up by picking less than stellar variants of Linux and customers appeared only too happy to desert when Microsoft finally got their act together.
As a result, Linux netbook sales tanked and it's almost impossible to buy one in a major retail outlet these days as customers aren't interested.
I don't believe Linux will ever have such a good chance again and, personally, I blame this on the OEM's who could have escaped the grasp of Microsoft but, in their haste, failed to ensure that the customer experience was a good one.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I disagree on a couple of points. Please bear with me while I set this up.
I carry a Droid X, and use Logmein Ignition to log into my main workstation to do the few operations I can't yet do on the phone itself. The only thing I really need is a slightly bigger screen. So yeah, the screen is too small.
My company issues ipads, and I find them very stable and usable. I've *never* thought "damn I need a keyboard for this" because the onscreen keyboard does what I need it to do. (And I'm a fast typist.) I've also never thought "damn, I need a bigger screen" because the screen is big enough and the GUI is designed so that things pop up when you need them and go away when you don't need them anymore.
The Samsung galaxy tablet has at least as good (in my opinion better) interface as the ipad, and it *will* fit in your pocket. It has significantly more screen real-estate than my Droid X but is almost as portable. Similar to the ipad, the virtual keyboard is good enough that I've not seriously considered getting an external keyboard for it.
So on issue 1, "it's too big or too small", it depends partly on what you're trying to do, but in general the best computer is the one you have with you, and I'm more likely to be carrying a 7 inch Android tablet than I will be lugging an ipad. And if I really needed the real estate of the ipad, I'd be tempted to lug a netbook instead, and have things like USB, external video, SDRAM slots, flash support, etc etc.
I think you see where this is going. Both iOS and Android have good enough virtual keyboard support (not just the keyboard itself, but positioning, operation, how it's called up and dismissed and stuff like that) that "where the heck is the keyboard" is pretty much a non-issue.
Now what of Ubuntu?
If Ubuntu is implemented on tablets of the size, weight, complexity and cost of laptop computers, with half-assed touch support that wasn't properly thought through, you *will* be in a position saying "this is too big for this job, too small for that one, too heavy to carry around in one hand, and where the heck is the keyboard??" To which I'd add the possibility that "Right click on this thing is a right pain in the ass". ...and the product will be a failure.
Want to see how to do it wrong? Look at current Windows 7 tablet support. Instead of coming up with a touch paradigm that works well, Microsoft has chosen to fake it by leveraging their existing Accessibility tools. It's a total fail -- clunky and annoying to use, with a half-assed keyboard and kludgy mouse gestures that make you wish you had a real keyboard and mouse, too big (to make room for the task bar, tray, start button, walking menus, lack of virtual desktop) to have any kind of portability advantage, too small to be a serious PC. Windows 7 tablet support is everything you were complaining about.
To be a serious contender, Ubuntu needs to be a *lot* better than that. But Apple and Google have demonstrated that it can be done.
I can tell you from experience that I can do probably 70% of the work I need to do on the iPad, and with Ignition I can get to my real PC and do the rest.
Hell, I can do about 50% of my work from my Droid X, and (with some difficulty) still log into my PC from the phone to do the stuff I can't do locally. If either the iPad or the Droid had USB support, I could leave my laptop at home on business trips.
Having used both, I estimate that I can do any part of my workflow on the 7" Galaxy tablet that I could do on the 9.7" iPad screen, and I'm more likely to have the smaller form factor on me.
And so, an Ubuntu tablet with USB host support, SD card reader, and a decent, usable GUI in a 7" form factor would be a godsend. It should also have an HDMI out like the Droid X so I can do presentations without having to lug a laptop.
In summary, the whole point of this exercise is to be able to do most of your work without having to lug around a backpack. Current hig
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The year of Firefox was missed because Chrome burst on the scene, and honestly Firefox had long lost the lead in innovation. The situation is similar with Desktop Linux.
Linux on the desktop has missed it's chance, the PC desktop is no longer the bleeding edge of development (at least as far as media and community buzz is concerned) in the face of new platforms. Hardware gets faster but it isn't really needed. Windows 7 and Linux run pretty fast. I haven't updated my hardware since 2008 and would see no benefit. SSDs have come of age, so I picked one up. I essientially experience no delay for anything. I see little point in sinking my yearly $1500 into hardware update, and little advantage in speed brought in software updates. (All the lag from a bloated Windows install was due to disk footprint and usage - lots of random reads over a big install footprint. Linux would do the same if you really went nuts with it. This is totally gone with a SSD, your Windows install remains as fast as the day it was new)
People are less interested in their desktop computing experience and keeping it up to date. With less interest, any radical change in the way people do computing is going to be harder.
To me, Linux has missed it's chance. All these years we battled with crappy Windows XP and Vista, when it would have been nice to hand a live CD to someone and solve all their computer problems. Installing Linux would most often give you a new set of exciting and deliberately difficult problems to solve, which was great, if (to use an analogy) you'd prefer a tough rubix cube to having sex. Getting the best out of Linux as a desktop took time and effort, because it came pre-broken to some extent, it was fun for some torture for others who were no doubt looking to escape toture. Now you can have 100% functional Ubuntu in 20 minutes, when back in the day that was luck of the draw. It's actually rather boring having nothing to fix to be honest. But for many people, tinkering is not the point of technology, technology is a tool not a toy.
It's kind of like that now, you take a oldish computer, boot Ubuntu live, install, a few commands and it's a revived fully capable useful and fast machine. It's a free download and burn away, and there's tons of software available for free.
So why isn't it taking off? What's the problem? Well, we needed that about five years ago. Back then you were lucky if you could pull this off with linux, and then you'd have to do without flash, or properly working graphics drivers.
I had an epiphany when I wiped a old machine I'd installed Ubuntu 6.06 on and fogotten about, with Ubuntu 10.10. It was MUCH faster, and booted in 40 seconds to the desktop rather than more than a minute.
Problem is, Windows 7 was a leap ahead, I remember seeing Cannonical rush to make Ubuntu take less than a minute and a half to boot as soon as Windows 7 Beta's started showing massively improved boot performance.
Why couldn't that have been done sooner?
Why did it take until 2006 for compiz to go 1.0, when windows Vista? We saw 3D desktop effects demo'd by Microsoft in early longhorn in August 2003.
Theres not many more lines of code in a 2010 linux distro than a 2006, so why does it all run so much faster now on 2006 hardware? It's all been re-written ten times over in the process, re-written only to be incrementally better.
I guess there are lots of problems that can't be solved at a programmers desk, and decisions that can only be made from data gathered in a lab. Microsoft and Apple spend millions, billions even on R&D, labs, on UI studies etc for good reason.
Linux more than ever needs truly excellent UI design. Or it's just too late.
Android on the other hand is linux done really well.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Uhhhh...it sounds like about half the stuff on your tablets does not work but "other than that" it runs pretty well? It is THIS, this "it is free so you should put up with it" attitude that keeps FLOSS from taking off on mainstream PC devices like netbook/nettops, laptops, desktops, etc.
Another perfect example: Remember how everyone was touting when Dell started selling Ubuntu on select netbooks? Ever look at one? Notice anything....funny...about them? Like the fact that Dell removes ALL Canonical repos and has to run their own? Why is that? Is it because Dell is pushing crapware on them like on the Windows boxes? Nope, it is due to the fact that even with such a limited amount of hardware to support Canonical can't be bothered to do actual QA before release and if you use the regular repos it breaks the Ethernet and sound! Oh joy, oh happy day!
Now damn it, I KNOW good quality FOSS software CAN be done. Hell Jobs took BSD and built an empire with it that has even surpassed MSFT in market cap so it CAN be done! But it will NOT ever be done with this "oh well, it kinda sorta works" attitude. If Apple pushed out an update that broke half the Macs don't you think people would have a fit? If MSFT broke half the new Dells out there? Hell yes, heads would roll! So why this "shit sandwich" attitude? It is like someone saying "Free meal!" and when you sit down they hand you a shit sandwich and say "hey it's free, you've no right to complain" well bullshit, we have EVERY right!
As a retailer I WANT to be able to sell Linux boxes, and not just "hey lets put it on the shitty hardware" boxes like what Walmart tried, but actual good quality machines! I WANT to have nice Ubuntu boxes right beside the Windows ones, and know that for at least 5 years after I sold it that it will keep running, even after updating! But right now frankly I can't. I can't because there is no hardware ABI, every damned upgrade which at 6 months is ridiculous, breaks two things while fixing one. I can't because I can't even expect it to go a full year without "update foo broke my driver" bullshit thanks to lousy QA, it is just a mess!
So while I wish these Chinese luck, I'll think they'll find out the same thing I and every other retailer I've talked to found out, that Linux ends up costing MORE money than Windows. How could that be? Simple figure in the returns when updates break crap, which by law then have to be sold as used, usually at a loss, figure in the amount of time required to fix all those breaks, and it quickly becomes MORE expensive than simply slapping an OEM Windows Home license and calling it a day. I'm sure I'll get hate for saying the emperor has no clothes, but he is wearing his birthday suit and his willie is waving in the breeze.
The average Joe, the ones you HAVE TO sell to to gain critical mass, ain't messing with CLI, ain't gonna deal with "update foo broke my drivers" or trawl forums for fixes. If a box leaves the store working it needs to STAY working as long as the user follows basic best practices. That simply isn't the case with Linux, as by following best practices the user will BREAK the machine by updating! So I have the choice of either pulling a Dell and repackaging everything and running my own repo (too expensive), turning off updates and leaving the machine vulnerable (unacceptable), fixing every update fuckup for life for free (too expensive) or just slapping a Windows License and an AV and AntiMal and calling it a day. Which do you think in the end I'm gonna choose?
So please don't settle for this "it kinda sorta works" shit sandwich mentality, demand real progress! Demand either a stable ABI, or if Linux guys hate those so much, even though Solaris, BSD, Windows, hell just about every OS other than Linux, has had them for over a decade? Fine, tell us of another way to INSURE that drivers continue working across releases and DO THAT. None of this "let the kernel devs" handle it BS, If a driver works now it should work five years from now AS IS PERIOD. Make it easy, make it reliable, and guys like me will be happy to sell your product and display it proudly on our shelves. Hell you think we spend all that extra money in Windows licenses because we LIKE to add that to our final cost?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.