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Project To Build Dual-Booting Linux, Android Tablet For $100
SternisheFan sends this quote from Ars:
"It likely won’t be as sleek or fast as a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10, but a new tablet running both Android and Linux is in the works for open source enthusiasts and lovers of low-budget devices. PengPod tablets, made by a company called Peacock Imports, will dual-boot Android 4.0 and a version of Linux with the KDE Plasma Active interface for touch screens. But in order to reserve a tablet for yourself, you'll have to contribute to the company's crowdfunding project on Indiegogo and hope enough money is raised to begin production. 'Our goal is to build a powerful, True Linux Tablet, one free of Google and Android's restrictions, at a reasonable price,' the PengPod IndieGogo page says. 'If you're a Linux fanatic you probably ended up getting an Android phone. Hey, it's Linux right? It'll be open, run all the programs I'm familiar with and let me hack around and have some fun right? Too often, this is not so. That is why we set out to find a way to run real Linux and all the software you really want.'"
One Linux Per Contributor?
--- Mercutio was right.
Chances are this will lead to a crappy tablet, if there's no $BIG_COMPANY adoption, if it leads to a tablet at all ...
'Our goal is to build a powerful, True Linux Tablet, one free of Google and Android's restrictions, at a reasonable price,
Yeah, that onerous Apache license that stop you from doing.. uh.. what exactly?
Well, I mean at least hardware-wise they're free of the "restricted" $200 7" tablet that is instantly unlockable so you can put whatever you want on it, including Ubuntu...
Um, wat? How are Google's Nexus tablets "restricted"?
The folks behind PengPod are off to a slow start, with $769...
Wow, I could buy 7.69 of the non-available 1024x600 tablets with that!
For $100, i really hope its not based on the Maylong 150....
That linked thread illustrates why I can't stomach Linux forums. The guy is trying to explain to him that its ok for it to use 2x the memory, thats what Linux does (implying LOLOLOL Windows newb). Gag me to death please.
Maybe someone would work on a better OS for better, existing hardware instead of building another (and admittedly, clunky) tablet for dual booting.
Seriously?
A fool and his money are soon parted. Sheesh.
Ummmmm.... what?
Isn't that the whole point of Android? Free from restriction? Customizable? Hackable? Open?
Just go get a Nexus tablet. I love mine.
As a true Linux enthusiast I ended up with a Nokia N900, Please, anybody who has one and doesn't like it, offer to sell it soon. My understanding is the formerly great hardware manufacturer is facing severe financial hardship due to bad management decisions concerncing software. I've not seen anything even approaching it since it's introduction. I'd say less than a quarter even offer a hardware keyboard anymore.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
KDE4 runs just fine with 512MB RAM and modern Android devices have even more. If you'll read the thread you've linked, you'll see that it's an openSuSE issue which has a lot of pre-enabled KDE components that are not needed on a tabled (like semantic desktop).
They lost me on dual-_boot_... that's so 2005 for me at least, after that it's been the year of the linux desktop. If there's a boot involved it's one device and one OS for me please.
According to various tests on recent distributions (use your Google-fu to find them, it's not difficult), the memory use of KDE is not great, but not nearly as bad as Gnome 3 or Unity. However, it would seem that xfce or LXDE would be better choices for low memory devices.
In general memory required for Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 goes: Ubuntu (unity) > Kubuntu (KDE) > Xubuntu (xfce) > Lubuntu (LXDE). Similarly, memory required for the different desktop environments on Fedora 17 is: Gnome 3 > KDE > xfce > LXDE. That's without the akonadi stuff which was affecting the KDE example you linked to.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Could they not set the price to same price as other tablets and in that way actually be able to build a good tablet otherwise I would say Curiosity could smell the fail all the way from Mars.
Yes. Threads like that are why I switched to OS X. The people on the forum are trying to use the classic Linux excuses and make the user feel stupid and blame him for Linux shortcomings. KDE using over a gig of RAM is insane to me. Remember when Linux was supposed to be lightweight and flexible? Yeah, it probably never was but it definitely isn't now. I used to really believe in Free Software but it has totally failed to make a useful and helpful computer for professionals and casual users. What good having "software freedom" if the software is total shit? Sure, in the server (after having IBM, Redhat and Novell poured cash into it) it's quite decent but the desktop is just a failure and despite Google's best efforts Android ain't all that either.
Cool but have anyone tried to work with KDE/GNOME/LightWave with FINGERS? I mean god this interface is made for pixel precision device (like a fucking mouse) not manly fingers on 7" screen.
Why dual boot when you can run both simultaneously since both run on the same Linux kernel? Kind of how Windows 8 runs both WinRT apps(for tablet use) and desktop apps simultaneously. Best of both worlds, use the Android apps when you want to use a tablet, and then switch to KDE apps for real work, all without messy rebooting.
This space for rent.
It is true that the "It's the linux way" guy is appalling. But if you read the thread carefully, you will see that he gave the correct answer right in the first reply: Disable the Akonadi insanity.
BTW: I generally find MacOS X and Windows users even more intolerant. Every time I tell a Mac user that the Mac desktop is unusable for me they get downright aggressive in a way that I don't find with Linux users. Likewise I've been called "Dinosaur" by our Windows administrator for using command line interfaces.
OSX forums are just as bad. Hell I think all forums are full of twats trying to prove their self worth. OSX forums its more along the lines of 'you wanna do something different? IDIOT. apple didnt design it that way'. -- happy OSX and linux user.
I despair to see many of my IT colleagues, formerly Linux nuts who would happily spend a week debugging a wireless driver, drifting into Apple's curated world.
Usually it starts with a Macbook because, you know, it looks fantastic and it's UNIX. And that usually leads to a Time Capsule. Then comes then iPad.
By this point they've sold all their non-Apple gear and are evangilising the World of Curated Computing. Apparently it Just Works ( standing in line at Apple Care is apparently part of this ).
They'll just sneer at a Linux tablet. Open-ness is dying :-(
Too Good To Be True. It used to be that an inventor gets a patent then approaches a company to market the product. When did it change to crowdfunding (whatever the hell that is - sounds like tincup begging to me) with a promise of no return beyond being first in line for a product that right now only exists as a sequence of numbers on a spinning disk? Excuse me if I come off as arrogantly skeptical, but that's what life has taught me - if you leave yourself open to be shat on, then you will be shat on.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Came on, if you really want dual boot, let put it as option as much of OSes possible.
I have an Ainol (*snicker*) NOVO7 Elf II which I paid $120 for (on sale from $140, and free Fed-Ex 3 day shipping). It has 1GB DDR3 RAM, 16GB internal memory, G-Sensor, good display, 5-6 hour battery, and a Dual-Core 1.5GHz ARM processor.
It runs Android 4.1 and I can run Ubunu 12.10 from the sdcard with almost everything except the touchscreen because of no drivers for that, or the Mali-400 GPU.
What they seem to planning here doesn't seem to be all that impressive considering my chinese brand tablet can do all that. Truth be told it may not be open-source like they want, but the kernel sources for Ubuntu are obviously available, and the company has released the Android kernel they use.
Ainol is also one of those companies that churn out tons of Android tablets, and they seem to be doing fine. A sub $100 tablet doesn't seem like such an achievement.
Basically, I don't see what the appeal of this project is aside from mabe extended support, but even my device has a good community behind is releasing custom ROM's and constantly keeping it up-to-date and applying fixes from the hardware manufacturers.
Comparing the desktop KDE with the meant-for-tablets plasma active is not exactly fair. Can't assure for KDE plasma active (not tried it yet), but pure linux running tablet interfaces (maemo, meego, webos) in the past had good user experience (at least for me), specially with up to date hardware. And you don't have so far away the rest that comes with linux, from the system or shell to compiling or adapting for it things for other devices or environments, or, well, have plenty of user interfaces to play with if you don't like one in particular (even Sugar could be a valid one)
It isn't that bad, christ.
I ran KDE whatever version it was back on a 660Mhz Toshiba Satellite pro off a disc for 7 months on 1gig memory and NO hard drive until I saved up to buy a new hard drive.
Yes, it isn't the best choice for a portable, I will give you that though.
the only problem with XFCE4 / LXDE is that they are not designed with touch input in mind. KDE4's Plasma Active is designed for smaller screens and touch input, and generally the smaller screen devices it is designed to run on don't have quite as much RAM so a lot of the more memory intensive eye candy and other goofy crap is turned off by default while retaining the KDE power utilities - Konq / Dolphin spank the pants off Thunar / LxFM in terms of features. Thunar still hasn't gotten the "Open Terminal here" working to actually open the terminal in the directory it was selected from as of the last time I tried it ( ~2-3 months ago) it opens the terminal in your home dir.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
I always thought the same. Switching between OSes should be more simple, it just need a better boot management: How about a function built in both OS, that saves the memory just like as it was hibernate and switch by memory content? A modern firmware/BIOS should offer this possibility.
First a Tablet can be a "computer" but for most people it is a conduit to consuming stuff, preferably after having checked out their brain to the hat rack....
Now when a Tablet is used as an "adjunct" computer, it does make sense to have an open source OS running on it.
But the error in the pengPod strategy is that having the cheapest tablet possible actually is a guaranty of disappointment, I own a similarly priced 7ins Arnova tablet, it is "perfect" to look at a video on a long flight or train commute, it is acceptable as an ebook, and it gives a great testing platform for our games (as if it works on this, it'll work on about anything....)
I'm a "happy consumer" and double so because it was really cheap....
But if I ever buy a table to actually get some work done (for which I would need Linux) I would want at least something like a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 or an Archos x10 or an Asus Transformers (all three provide some efficient mode of data ENTRY, so they expect you to do more than cklikety clak more sugar for the brain please....)
Anybody building a Linux terminal should either focus on "really cheap stuff to do some automatisation" (because we are a little to lazy to use systems that are "real close to the iron", and prefer an embedded linux to some single process pic environement). :-)), but in most cases we can free as in freedom, and not free as in crappy ...
Or look at what Linux users actually buy!, it is not the "cheapest PC possible" but something that is rather powerful, except that we tend to keep them longer so sometimes they look crappy (like the toshiba netbook I'm using right not
So I'll probably end up buying the first tablet that is able to convincingly run ubuntu (or another linux) and offer a decent keyboard, hopefully it'll have something like the "note" pen also, and it should not be too heavy....
But I will not try to use Linux on a machine that I know will be disapointing....
If he doesn't use PowerShell, he can't be much of an admin...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Actually... yeah - why should you need to dual-boot when Linux Desktop and Android both use the Linux kernel?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The people on the forum are trying to use the classic Linux excuses and make the user feel stupid and blame him for Linux shortcomings.
No, the people in this forum are using a classic FUD technique of finding one nasty datum and pretending it's the whole world.
They're also lying about KDE, and being deceptive about the DE which will be used on this tablet. If you're genuinely interested in the system and have read past the mess of disinformation and proprietary propaganda that is today's Slashdot, go to the KDE Plasma-active site and test it yourself for free.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Some people get very confused about the kernel vs. user space applications. RMS said it best:
“Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel. People who erroneously think “Linux” refers to the entire GNU/Linux combination get tied in knots by these facts, and make paradoxical statements such as “Android contains Linux, but it isn’t Linux”. If we avoid starting from the confusion, the situation is simple: Android contains Linux, but not GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different.“
Android lacks the GNU libc and toolchain tho, could affect things.
So the project aims to create a tablet that will let you run Linux...or another, and more polished, version of Linux?
If it's just about having a more free platform than Android, why bother taking up storage space by putting Android on there? Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like a waste of time and money.
I live in Shenzhen, and here in China you can pick up these Allwiner based tablets for about $100-$125 USD. My buddy couldn't resist a bargain and bought one a few weeks ago. I was surprised how well it worked out of the box. Decent performance browsing heavy pages, and the all the 3D games I could throw at it ran smoothly. That Allwiner blows the Rasberry’s CPU out of the water.
Initially, I was tempted to get one. Then I started noticing the problems. The accelerometer hadn't been properly calibrated or mounted at the factory, meaning some racing games you have to hold the device at a 20 degree angle to drive straight. When the battery started getting low, I plugged it in to its proprietary charger only to find out the touch screen doesn't work when charging.
Then about a week later my buddy said the screen popped out after he left it charging overnight. Turns out the battery had swollen up. All these issue point to shoddy cheap components and lack of testing and QC. With only $100 to spend, suggest a used Kindle or Nexus 7.
In a couple years, when I get tired of whatever low-end SoC they can get in their $100 tablet, there'll be a couple new generation of SoCs, and either a low-end from the newest generation or a mid-range from the older generation will easily double the performance for the same price.
If the tablet uses EOMA-68 CPU cards, I'll just be able to buy a new CPU card and upgrade the tablet. And then I can put the old CPU card in something else (maybe a plugserver or such). If not, I'll have to buy a whole new tablet, and in that case, why wouldn't I just spend $200 no on one that's twice as fast?
EOMA-68 or go home.
the only problem with XFCE4 / LXDE is that they are not designed with touch input in mind
You missidentified the problem. XFCE4 is designed for desktop use so that is a feature, the problem is caused by one "size fits all" beeing a horrible idea.
A few examples as to why "on size fits all" is inherently crazy:
- cars: very few people drive an 18 wheeler, very few truckers would be happy about driving a smart.
- clothes: nobody is going to wear suit and tie when they are swimming/jogging
- spoons: large variety of spoons and I'm quite sure there is not a single one I would use to both eat soup and as a teaspoon.
- etc. etc.
Why to people think that software is different in that regard? I thought the "it's different on a PC" exuse of patents is seen as silly.
I have run KDE on openSUSE with 256MB of RAM, KDE is far from a memory hog.
When we are salivating for quad-core 2560x1200 coming out with a crap chinese knockoff and trying to flog it as something.. well anything really is bound to fail. We know what we want and until 'we' become a market that the majors feel like monetising we will have to do without or hack whats there.
they plan on not being sued out of existence for patent violations by Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC etc. not to mention the patent trolls.
Linux is absolutely lightweight and flexible, it's just that KDE and gnome seem to be making a mess of things lately in a stupid attempt to keep up with the Joneses.
I use xubuntu+xmonad and it is blazingly fast and flexible on 4+ year old hardware. I tried using Gnome and KDE but I feel they get in my way more than helping me do my stuff, but I am completely happy with my current setup.
I don't know how you define "much of an admin", but the guy certainly gets paid for administering the Windows networks (yes, plural) of a company with more than 1000 employees. Needless to say, catching him on the phone is "difficult".
There was literally just a story on why we wouldn't be seeing this type of thing... I'm all for this, but I can see this getting sued into oblivion :(
This is putting the cart before the horse. Make something that runs well on _existing_ tablets. _Then_ talk about building a special tablet to run it on. There are a lot of fine candidates out there—there's no reason to waste effort building another one that will deliver half the performance at the same price. A Nexus 7 or a Nexus 10 would be a great platform for prototyping this.
Having said that, I completely agree with your point about KDE. In addition to being a memory hog, it's hopelessly complicated and presents an impossible learning curve to anyone who just wants to figure out why dumped core. It might as well be closed source, for all the good that having the source does.
I'm right now on an HP-mini running KDE-Plasma on 2 Gb of RAM with 6 tabs open in Firefox and looking at the system monitor less than 400 Mb of RAM is in use.
When on a bare desktop with a couple of widgets running it's below 300 Mb, and yes that's of course without the indexing service running.
Would you take the tablet version of KDE you'd get even better results.
Stop trolling in a place with Real Users.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Trying to port Linux to Android tablets is a dead end. They will get Mer, OpenWrt, etc running on ONE tablet a year. If at all.
The alternative is to consider Android as a different Unix platform, with its limitations, and port KDE, Gnome, etc to Android. More details here:
http://www.elpauer.org/?p=1191
That path would reach potentially every Android tablet (and phone!). Easy? No. Doable? Sure thing.
Thunar opens the right dir in my installation. But open terminal is not always in the contextual menu.
I'd be wanting to run Enlightenment on this kind of thing
Good luck sometimes arrives disguised as bad
I declare the Black Model T is all anybody will need!
... for double the Linuxy fun! Where can I get one?
unity sucks.
/., with a zillion instances of gedit, terminal, and firefox pages, tunes blaring out of 5.1 surround system with rythm box, trying to code while looking up syntax, my system uses, get this:
/tmp mounted in RAM based tmpfs, and never ever ever came close to running out of memory. ever...
gnome-shell for all its flaws, runs, two monitors at 1440x900 at desktop idle, a whopping 220 MB of RAM.
while playing WoW in wine on one monitor, yakking away on xchat on another, while having firefox open to watch stupid youtube videos and engage in "polite discussion" on
just under 2 GB of ram.(so says gnome-system-utiliy I feel like a total idiot for spurging on 16GB of ram.
I have no swap enabled, and I feel quite comfortable with
So, Gnome and KDE might be memory hogs, but thats only relivant to gnu/linux. They are both still far more lightweight than either windows 7 or OSX.
Hell yeah. That's what I run on my Fujitsu U820 -- best combination so far of touch and desktop WM without compromising either side. (People who haven't used it lately, try it before you make assumptions.)
So you are recreating the SmartQMid?
Xfce or LXDE on a touchscreen without mouse or keyboard - yeah right. Also the device ought to have decentish resolution which given the size would mean that it has high DPI and that again requires a DE that actually can handle it.
tl;dr KDE is the only DE that actually meets the criteria for a modern portable device - high DPI and touch friendly. Well, and probably/hopefully E17, too.
So typical from the spoon and fork crowd. the Spork has all your needs covered, no need to utilize two separate eating utensils.
Just when will this FUD end?! Oi!
Plasma Active is not Plasma Desktop a.k.a. KDE4 Desktop shell. They share code but they are two different projects so it's not one size fit all, it's the exact opposite where there's one framework with multiple but independant graphical shell implementations.
Intriguing. Are you suggesting the tablet as a coding/development tool for programmers? Might be a nice on-the-go coding gadget, but I wouldn't want to compile anything but the simplest programs on such a dainty thing. Perhaps a more practical role as a development TARGET (or prototyping tool ala Arduino) for app builders fully supported by everything open source currently has to offer? I can see how that would appeal to mobile app developers who know their way around a compiler. But the benefits of access to GNU libc and a complete toolchain for the majority of non-coders eludes me at the moment. Maybe slashdot is the wrong place to ask, but how big of a niche is that relative to the tablet market as a whole? I would venture a guess that they'll probably appeal to as many as there existed Linux users back in the mid-late nineties when it was a fledgling thing most people didn't know about. My coding skills have rusted beyond salvage, so the critical justification for me would be: what need does Android currently NOT offer in app space that can be had in a roll-your-own Linux? The article mentioned KDE, but that hardly seems appropriate for a tablet at the moment. Maybe further down the line when that Plasma thing has matured and gained traction. Better suggestions anyone?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
This is putting the cart before the horse. Make something that runs well on _existing_ tablets. _Then_ talk about building a special tablet to run it on. There are a lot of fine candidates out there—there's no reason to waste effort building another one that will deliver half the performance at the same price. A Nexus 7 or a Nexus 10 would be a great platform for prototyping this.
I can't imagine that this isn't being done, at least internally. Can't we already go buy a Nexus 10 (or similar) and dual-boot Android and Linux w/Plasma-Active ourselves? Isn't the price the point of the project?
This is putting the cart before the horse. Make something that runs well on _existing_ tablets. _Then_ talk about building a special tablet to run it on. There are a lot of fine candidates out there—there's no reason to waste effort building another one that will deliver half the performance at the same price. A Nexus 7 or a Nexus 10 would be a great platform for prototyping this.
I can't imagine that this isn't being done, at least internally. Can't we already go buy a Nexus 10 (or similar) and dual-boot Android and Linux w/Plasma-Active ourselves? Isn't the price the point of the project?
Actually, taking a second look at the specs in the article, I'm surprised anyone is behind this. The "vertical" resolutions are 480 pixels (7") and 600 pixels (10"). That is ridiculous. With the Nexus line so competitively priced, who would ever touch one of these?
OK, they're not using Kickstarter. But the fact remains that the crowdfunding mechanism is a stupid way to buy stuff. If you think the project is unbearably kewl, by all means donate some money. But if you think "buy it in advance so we can get the money to develop it" is a reasonable way to buy stuff, I have a Nigerian prince who wants to talk to you.
If the Linux they were shipping was "Real Linux for Desktops"(tm), then it wouldn't be appropriate for tablet use.
It's not, though, it's KDE Plasma. Thus, it is appropriate for tablet use, but basically has no applications. Unless you want to use Desktop apps like OpenOffice somehow. Those will be big and slow and heavy compared to Android or iOS apps. I just don't see the point here. Android (at least on Nexus) devices is not that "closed", etc.
There's also cygwin and a pile of other scripting environments that work on MS Windows.
That's where people ran into the brick wall of trade secrets in the graphics hardware and no way to make something run well without painstakingly reverse engineering the things. Starting with documented hardware that does the job makes sense in that context.
You know that you should have ALWAYS some swap enabled... even if its just 100MB (1GB should be better). The linux kernel have some entries that fail if there no swap enabled, even if you have free memory and no need for swap, that might create weird problems.
Also, swap is good for big apps like chrome, firefox, java, etc, where the apps requests several GB of RAM, but will just use a small part of that. Without swap you will lose all that unused RAM, with swap that unused RAM is mapped to the swap (without any IO or delay, so its a win-win)
Also, tmpfs can be mapped to the swap if you would ever need to free RAM (i know, you believe that you will never need this, but just in case...)
So please, add some swap! :)
Higuita
Remember that all windows 8 ARM based devices are REQUIRED to lock the boot to signed binaries... on the X86 is "just" recommended.
I dont know if the FSF/redhat/ubuntu boot loader can work on ARM (as usually the boot is limited by the cpu and firmware)... it might be a while until you can run other OS on MS surface.
Higuita