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Ask Slashdot: Best Tablet For Running a Real GNU/Linux Distribution?
bmsleight writes "Android is nice, but I do not want to pay to print or be beholden to the cloud to do everything or chroot. I just want a tablet that can run a MythTv-client, OpenOffice.org and good old apt-get instead of an app market. I have a Joggler — which costs £60 — I'd like something similar but with a battery, a bigger screen, and other modern tablet features. So, what's the best tablet for running a real GNU/Linux distribution (ideally Debian)? Bonus points for the best apt-get-able distribution that works with a tablet."
You want to try Unity.
Tablet owners are the only people remaining i haven't heard complaining about it.
The Asus Transformer isn't exactly cheap, but you can run full blown Linux distros on it. I've read of people running Ubuntu on it. I've had Arch Linux running on mine. I went back to Android after a bit just because my OS choices were more for the "cause I could" factor.
Password Authentication Bypassed for Root
Linux based WebOS is going to be free, as HP announced yesterday, and Ubuntu has been installed on the Touchpad already. In the US Touchpads can be purchased for low price, like $99 on eBay. Outside the US some (for example me) got one for low price through Amazon.
has dev firmware that is gnu/debian
Ok, a tablet PC is not exactly the same thing as a plain tablet, but if you are serious about Linux, then you can't beat a proper laptop that can also be used as a tablet with the keyboard folded down.
I have a 10" Iconia Tab A500 and I know one can run Ubuntu on it, though I do not know how easy it is to install as I haven't tried it. A500 may not be the best tablet out there, but it sports a pretty good, strong aluminum construction which makes it plenty sturdy, and more importantly it sports a full-size USB-host port meaning that you can plug in all kinds of regular USB-devices. In an emergency you can even charge your cellphone from it.
A500 has bluetooth, 802.11n support and does have a MicroSDHC slot for expanding storage, but it isn't exactly cheap. And it doesn't come with 3G. If you want 3G then you can use a USB-dongle under Ubuntu or buy A501 which is otherwise the same as A500 but does include a built-in 3G modem (though I don't know if it is supported under Ubuntu, you better google that)
Other than that I really do not have much to offer though, sorry.
You do not have to pay to print on Android, and nor do you need to rely on Cloud Print to print either.
You just need to install the Android app from the printer manufacturer that makes your printer. That's all. And those apps are all free (with no ads and no paid apps equivalents). You can just think of them as drivers. They'll work through the usb to your computer, through bluetooth, or through wifi.
I love my Lifebook T900 from Fujitsu. I run either Windows 7 or Debian Mint. I like having the power, the screen is a Wacom Tablet, and I can do powerful shit on it. Max RAM is only 8GB at this point, and getting Linux to address all the functions of the Wacom was a challenge (and not quite finished yet), but overall it is a great convertible tablet. My younger brother calls it my $5000 chess board, but the i7 processor gives me some great math and graphics possibilities.
My second choice would have been a similar tablet from Lenovo. I've used Lenovo tablets before and always found them dependable and very usable with Linux installed. I picked the Fujitsu because it seemed to have more durability features.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
By your reasoning, thinking for oneself takes time, and there are plenty of people offering pre-made opinions (religious leaders, journalists, politicians), so why the fuck would you even consider thinking for yourself? It's just a waste of time.
You could try the Smart Book from Always Innovating
www.alwaysinnovating.com
This is the tablet/netbook convertible that seems to have been the inspiration for the Asus Transformer
Comes preloaded with AIOS (their own customised flavour of linux), Android, Ubuntu, and ChromiumOS
I'm hoping to have one soon myself to try.
da da da dum indeed.
Here's the thread on debian-arm: http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2011/12/msg00008.html and the corresponding one on arm-netbook: http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2011-December/thread.html
The problem that's been made clear time and time again is that if you want low-cost mass-produced hardware, you normally have to go with GPL-violating products (see list here http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/android_tablets/) and that means that you will spend the majority of your time reverse-engineering the product for anything between two weeks and two years, depending on luck and skill, before getting something useful. By the time you're done, the product is usually end-of-lifed: thus if it breaks, you're back to square one.
The reason for the GPL violations is that the low-cost China-based Factories simply have zero software skills: they're provided with binary-only firmware from an ODM who themselves usually had to sign an NDA from the SoC manufacturer, itself in direct violation of the GPL, in order to get access to the source code. Normally there's a chain of at least *five* companies with whom you have to negotiate with for several days or weeks - each - in order to explain the situation to them, against a precarious balance of them basically not giving a stuff because there's no financial incentive for them to give you anything at all: they're already making money, selling product, so why should they care?
thus, we logically concluded that the only way to get non-GPL-violating product out there is to go directly to the factories and be the supplier of their software.
so for the past two years i've been contacting and vetting China-based factories, directly, to find at least one which is prepared to work with us (RH Technology - http://www.rh-technology.com./ the basis of the deal is, "we won't charge you for software expertise if you won't charge us for hardware design costs", and after two years we finally found _one_ factory willing to do a deal, and are looking for more.
we've also found an absolutely great CPU, called the Allwinner A10, which in mass-volume quantities is only about $7: that means that a PCB similar to the raspberrypi with similar features can be made for about $15 (not $25) and, because the Allwinner CPU is an ARM Cortex A8 not an ARM11 it is at least three times quicker than the raspberrypi's CPU.
now we have at least 15 Debian Developers who are willing to support the project by buying beta hardware samples, and we're looking for more people to help support this effort, by committing to buy product (just like with the OpenPandora http://openpandora.org./ we have set up a CIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_interest_company) because it's a better vehicle than a non-profit, charity or profit-maximising company. the CIC is called Rhombus Tech - http://rhombus-tech.net./
we also have the full support of the Board of Directors of the Allwinner CPU: they released full source code to us in advance. we've made it available and found it to compile successfully.
in-advance GPL-compliant hardware really is very very unusual. even USA-based companies typically release GPL source code on or after the day that a product is announced. Archos for example made a tablet that used the Telechips TCC8900 series of CPUs, and complied with the GPL (in direct violation of the standard NDA available at the time from the SoC manufacturer!).
other than that: about the only existing product on the market that i can really recommend to you is the alwaysinnovating touchbook: http://alwaysinnovating.com/ - it's about $300.
Have a look at Archos tablets. They support Debian on their gen8 series, but those are still a bit slow. People are already running debian on their gen9 products, and official support for that is coming soon.
See also:
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet
http://dev.openaos.org/wiki/Debian
Seriously - the best system for running an OS and applications designed for a reasonable sized screen, physical keyboard and pointing device is one with... a decent-sized screen, physical keyboard and pointing device. Conversely, if you want a truly handheld device with no keyboard and a touch screen, you want a system and apps designed specifically for that environment.
That's one of the reasons why the iPad succeeded and previous Windows-running tablets didn't. I got an iPad because I was finding my iPod touch and Android phone very useful for certain things and could see a use for a larger version, not because I wanted a replacement for my "proper" computers.
OpenOffice would be hell on a tablet - I'm sure you could get it running, but its just not designed to be usable in that mode.
A MythTV front end for tablets would be terrific - if the UI were re-designed for touch operation: currently its really designed for a remote control or keyboard. Of course, you'd also have to worry about which video formats enjoyed hardware acceleration since your tablet CPU might not be up to software-only decoding (some existing solutions transcode stuff on the server side so the tablet can run them).
So, I guess the Asus Transformer sounds like a contender - but the whole point of that is that you can always disconnect it from the keyboard and use it handheld: if most of your software is going to require the keyboard then why not save your cash and get a netbook?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I think I'll take your mention of OpenOffice off on a tangent to do a little plug of my free software project...
A few months ago, I began the process of trying to port Apache POI to Android. For those who don't know, Apache POI is "the Java API for Microsoft Documents". It does Word and Excel, and also tries to implement other Microsoft formats, with various degrees of success.
I decided to start with a spreadsheet. I spent two weeks writing some scaffolding for a spreadsheet in Android. When I got it to where it looked good enough, I began working on loading Excel files with POI. And I could do so - with Excel xls files up to 2007. When I tried to load Excel 2007 and 2010 xlsx files, I ran into some problems...a topic which I'll get back to in a moment. Anyhow, I worked on trying to load Excel 2007/2010 xlsx files for a few more weeks, and when I saw I wouldn't, without luck, make any immediate breakthroughs, I put it aside. A few months later I open sourced my code on Github and cursorily described my 200/2010 problem in the README file. If anyone wants to look at it, feel free. As I said, I worked on features for two weeks and then got hung on one the 2007/2010 xlsx problem. The one big feature I did not include in the spreadsheet is the ability to finger swipe through the spreadsheet rows and columns - you can look around the spreadsheet with the arrow buttons on old, old Android phones and the Android emulator, but I spent all my time working on Excel 2007/2010 xlsx instead of features like that. It's only two weeks worth of work (plus the 2007/2010 xlsx work), and that minus my last six months of Android knowledge, but it's decent enough for what it is.
I sent a message to the POI mailing list after posting the code on Github. One of the POI dev's made a suggestion as to what to do - strip all non-Excel functionality from the schemas file - but that was what I already had for the most part done. I say for the most part because I probably stripped more than 80% of the non-Excel code. Why did I need to do this? Because Android Dalvik executables have a 65,536 method limit, and with all the Apache POI XSSF required libraries to do Excel 2007/2010 xlsx files included, my program would exceed that limit. Now there are two paths to get around this. One is the easier path - strip 100% of the POI stuff unneeded for Excel compatibility from the POI schemas jar. But I already stripped the low hanging fruit of this, and whittled 80+% of that stuff from the schema. Unless the other
Anyhow, back in July, when I stripped 80+% of the low-hanging fruit non-Excel schema and it was still a no-go, I put this aside and began working on other Android projects. In October I began thinking about this, and realized I was not going to get back to it in a while, so I cleaned it up (a little bit) and put it up on Github under the Apache 2.0 license (POI is Apache 2.0 so I figured I'd just use that as well), and posted to the POI mailing list.
I've had enough Android projects, and non-Android projects and things to distract me from returning to this. If my attention was turned to this again, the first thing I would do would be to repeat my 80+% non-Excel POI schema cleaning with the latest POI trunk (or last released jar, or whatever) and make my results public on a web page, or the POI mailing list or something. I would try to get it from 80%+ to 85+% and up to 100% clean of everything unneeded. If that didn't work, I would see if I could strip stuff from some of the other jar's, like xmlbeans or something.
If all of this didn't work, I would go the way of two Dalvik executable files in one Android project. With custom class loading, an interface for each needed method and all of that. An effort I seriously doubt I would start on my own - but who knows? If others were interested in this, I might put some more time and effort into it when I can. It would be nice to have a free software Excel-compatible spreads
There are far too many idiots on /. lately.
The point of Linux, and of Open Source in general, is that the vast majority of time one spends on a computer is not the day (or few days even) it takes to install an OS. The vast majority of time is spent developing that OS into something useable in day-to-day work. And the most time-efficient way of doing that is to get a freely-modifiable operating system into the hands of as many people as possible, give them the means to collaborate, and enable them build the most effective tools and programs possible.
Do you see the step in that process that requires the OS to be used by as many people as possible? That's what we're discussing. An OS that only runs on expensive hardware doesn't meet that requirement.
Linux is a community OS. Members of a community voluntarily act in ways which tend to subsidize the group, even when it may not appear to outsiders to be in their individual interests, because it is in their best interests in the long run.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The new generation (G9) Archos tablets look promising for running a more GNU/Linux than Android distro on them.
KDEs Plasma Active, on top of MER is being worked on:
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet
And the general philosophy of Archos seems to be encouraging development of alternative firmwares (not without loosing warranty, though):
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
www.alwaysinnovating.com has a open source hardware tablet. It's where Asus got the idea from. It's compatible with any distro that supports ARM
A few years ago I got a Compaq TC1000 from eBay. It ran linux flawlessly, although it needed the proprietary nvidia driver to get screen rotation. This was long before the iPad, the current tablet craze or much thought of special operating systems for tablets (ok, it came with a special mobile edition of windows, but their wasn't much difference). Now the TC1000 is low power for today's needs but I'm sure there must be lots of tablets out there with a higher spec that people are offloading because they want an iPad or equivalent. They may not have capacitive touch-screens but otherwise would probably be ideal for you.
And having type apt-get in to install an app totally defeats the point of the touchscreen input mechanism and UI, what you want is a MacBook air or other thin laptop.
No, it doesn't. You won't be spending the bulk of your time apt-getting packages on the thing. But for when you do, if the tablet has a real USB port, you could use a normal keyboard, or you could ssh into it.
The apt-getability implies ease of installation and freedom of configuration.
Once you have it setup with for example KDEs Plasma Active gui just the way(s) you want it, you proceed using it in a tablet-like manner, at the same time feeling happy about being a (at least figuratively) bearded champion of Freedom and transparency, the main tenets of democracy.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
i tried, i really did. i even tried google translate.
I pre-ordered a smartbook in february 2010 (!!) and there is nothing there yet.
Forums are dead.
IRC is dead.
No reply to any email you send to them.
Dont bother with this company!
I have it running and here is how: http://blog.mister-muffin.de/2011/05/01/putting-debian-on-the-notion-ink-adam/
You can compile on the TP using UbuntuChroot. C/C++/Perl/Prolog/Python - name your language. All work just fine. You can also install a similar chrooted self-contained Linux on Android. The problem with Android is the need to have a properly rooted host environment and not all kernels allow that easily. I ran into that with binding sockets as a non-root user on a 7" tablet. E.g. I could run ssh (client) as root, but not as a user. This is a problem - explained by the author of the chrooted Linux for Android - with the way Android host rooting works. The same problem does not occur on chroot on WebOS. Of course, if you are talking a native environment on an Android-capable machine, you would not have those issues - certainly. You can also add whatever repositories exist for arm by editing the apt config files.
No, it works just fine if you set up the VNC X server and connect via a VNC client from the native Android. Worked with that on a 7" tablet just fine. You can install KDE and Gnome - if you have the memory - and they also work. Even if you install a lesser windows manager, you can still install and run the libraries and apps that depend on them from Gnome and KDE on a chrooted environment under Android. Works great. Takes a few seconds to type apt-get... LXDE is recommended though for compactness and is a very nice lean window manager.
Even if you are lucky and Linux installs with no hitches, you will waste a day. If things don't go smoothly, which is far more common than the Linux community admits, expect to waste 3 days to a week.
Bullshit... I have never had a Linux install take longer than a Windows install, even with "problems." Generally, a Linux install takes less than an hour. Two hours if there is an odd graphics or WiFi bug. Windows takes 3 minimum, and often more if you need odd drivers.
...what you want is a MacBook air or other thin laptop.
So glad you have the ability to figure out what people actually want. Now go get a job at Apple or Microsoft so they actually start making the things we want.
My setup is not a tablet, but it's very portable and flexible and runs a pretty much fully fledged Ubuntu install any time I want to. It also keeps the number of gadgets I carry around and thus synchronize to a minimum.
The basic part of my setup is a Motorola Atrix (http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/Motorola-ATRIX-US-EN) with the Lapdock (http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/accessory-details/?LOSGId=accessoryBucket&q_sku=sku5100298#fbid=GYMvsMM9JQx). To that I then used Webtop2SD (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1119555) to move my Webtop environment to my 16GB SD card on its own dedicated 4GB partition and then did the work to create a full Ubuntu on Webtop (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1000316). Of course, I had to root the phone but that was dead easy... in fact all of the above steps I did in about an hour while sitting at my dining room table drinking my coffee on a Saturday morning.
It's not perfect... I'll admit that. It's slow compared to a laptop but in terms of functionality it's excellent. I can apt-get or run synaptic from my command line, and I added a small Gnome toolbar on the left side of the screen that contains my standard Gnome menu. I can surf the web, write articles in OpenOffice and I am not at the mercy of WiFi in order to be able to access the Internet. The Lapdock contains a battery that charges the phone while it's docked, and so I have gotten several hours of work done without needing to recharge either, and by the time I was done my phone was fully charged anyway.
The beauty part was that I was able to then go home and slap my phone into my Multimedia Dock (http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Multimedia-Dock-ATRIX-Packaging/dp/B004LWYYZ0) which is hooked up to my 23" widescreen monitor and has a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and there was my desktop again like it had never left.
I recently flew about 900 miles from home to get a new car (BMW Performance Center Delivery - http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Experience/Events/PDS/BMWPerformanceCenterFAQ.aspx) and drove all the way home, and all I took with me was my Atrix and Lapdock as well as my cameras and I was able to use them to move pictures and videos to a USB stick temporarily to clear up space on the cameras, as well as use it to check into email and so on. If I'd needed to I could even have dialed into work thanks to our Citrix XenDesktop environment that works like champ on the Lapdock. Thankfully that was unnecessary as it would have really detracted from my driving my new BMW on the Tail of the Dragon (twice!) and the Cherohala Skyway (which I videoed both of them using my ContourGPS video camera and car mount).
We've made a Debian chroot installer and manager app for Android, so you can have a Debian chroot running in parallel with Android. You can apt-get anything in Debian/arm. We're interested in server software, so we haven't tried anything beyond things like ssh, nginx, jabberd, etc.
https://guardianproject.info/code/lildebi/
And the code is up on Github:
https://github.com/guardianproject/lildebi
Yes, they should. ;)
http://www.factoryfive.com/