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.
What this means is that:
a. People will be unable to try anything with 12.04 until it's ported to
this tablet
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.
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...
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.
On 30/01/12 09:49, Alan Pope wrote:
Hi Randall,
On 28/01/12 02:37, Randall Ross wrote:
As we wait for a real Ubuntu tablet (with Ubuntu pre-installed,
certified, etc), what's the best bet for demonstrating Ubuntu's
greatness on a tablet to get people excited about the concept? Are there
any tablets currently on the market that can be handily wiped and
reloaded with Precise Pangolin, or 11.10?
I'd recommend looking at the ASUS EEE Pad Transformer [0] rather than
the newer Prime. It has a decent spec, is widely available and has an
optional hardware keyboard which makes it great for hacking on. It's
capable of running Ubuntu natively but needs a little love to get it
running really sweetly.
Note: I'm looking for suggestions that run Ubuntu as the sole OS and as
natively as possible, not in a virtual machine, or as a guest of another
OS, or some hacky thing that "sorta kinda" works...
Note that right now Ubuntu and the applications we ship aren't
designed for tablets. So you're not going to get an 'as good as
$OTHER_TABLET' performance or usability at the moment. There have been
people showing off stock Ubuntu installs on various tablets but they
are often far from ideal.
I'm certain that before any 'Ubuntu Tablet' comes to market these
issues will be thought about carefully and ironed out.
Cheers,
Al.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_Pad_Transformer
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