Canonical Announces Ubuntu for Smartphones

[CeesH]

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said the Ubuntu for mobile platform would be available in 2013 on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus devices as a replacement for the usual Android. No specific carriers or manufacturers have yet announced support, but Canonical said mobile Ubuntu-specific phones are expected to be released in late 2013 or early 2014.

CeesH

[armido]

CeesH,

This is good news provided this development makes it possible to replace android with Ubuntu outright on existing tablets in the same manner we install custom ROMs. Good, but less so if it is only available on future tablets...

armido

[gjorgensen]

Originally Posted by armido

CeesH,

This is good news provided this development makes it possible to replace android with Ubuntu outright on existing tablets in the same manner we install custom ROMs. Good, but less so if it is only available on future tablets...

armido

It's aimed squarely at new devices (phones and tablets) designed to run Ubuntu, and so far no hardware vendors have announced anything. That's not to say that at some point someone won't port it over, but doing the port for an existing Android tablet is likely to be fairly difficult, and for that matter simply replacing the OS will not be trivial for the user. All you can do right now is cross your fingers and hope some hardware decides to support it with a cheap piece of hardware. And if that happens, someone will then have to take up the work of porting OpenCPN onto this platform.

[Matt Johnson]

Shouldn't be too hard to get it working on older systems. I currently use an HP Touchpad that was designed for WebOS, but now runs Android just fine. Took all of an hour to get everything up and running thanks to the hard work of the programmers. You need to have some basic knowledge for any troubleshooting that pops up, but with the step by step instructions given, you really don't need to know anything to set it up. If you can get OpenCPN running on a windows machine, you should be able to get this OS running on a different tablet.

[cadlard]

See the link below for instructions from Canonical on how to install Ubuntu onto a nexus 7 tablet. Interesting!!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/Installation

[gjorgensen]

Originally Posted by cadlard

See the link below for instructions from Canonical on how to install Ubuntu onto a nexus 7 tablet. Interesting!!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/Installation

Wow, I stand corrected. That's pretty cool actually.