It is that time of the year again where we’re nearing a a new Ubuntu release and as usual the Ubuntu ARM team can show off with support for a new architecture.
Have you already heard about the new shiny TI OMAP4 CPU ? If you haven’t yet and are interested in ARM stuff you surely will very soon. Ubuntu will additionally to the already known OMAP3 images release images for the OMAP4 architecture with the 10.10 Maverick release.
Yesterday www.pandaboard.org went online and you can sign up now for the early adopter program.
Ubuntu on the panda will be the best Ubuntu ARM experience you ever had thanks to collaborative efforts the Ubuntu ARM and TI developer teams made.
With the new hardware release of the beagleboard XM that comes with 512M of RAM there finally exists a beagleboard that can run a full Ubuntu desktop really snappy making it more than just a a developer toy.
With 10.10 the Ubuntu ARM team also introduces the brand new type of preinstalled images. Once written to an SD card they expand themselves to the full size of the card on first boot and run the shiny new OEM config welcome screen (kudos to the installer team for that one)
But thats not all thats new in ARM land …
Are you an Ubuntu developer and interested in ARM … but never really started because carrying a bare board with you everywhere makes you recognizable as a geek immediately ?
There is help !!!!
About 4 weeks ago Toshiba brought the Nvidia Tegra2 based AC 100 to the stores in Europe it is a neat ARM Netbook that comes with a fully locked down android preinstalled …
Very fast people started to ask about Ubuntu or debian or any other Linux on the device … but indeed it comes with android …
Within a few days a developer community formed around teh AC 100 … and after a week the first possibility to gain root on the preinstalled android was found …
Now 4 weeks later the awesome guys from the #ac100 freenode IRC channel published a fully working Ubuntu ARM image for it … while still using the android kernel, the users pace is completely Ubuntu Netbook … with a few drawbacks (no sound, the HW buttons do not work yet and other little annoyances)
I’m confident these guys will soon figure out all remaining issues …
If you own such a Netbook, you can find the Ubuntu image and installation instructions at http://ac100.gudinna.com/
Kudos to such an awesome community effort and as Ubuntu ARM developer I’m proud to see the first distro running on it is Ubuntu (this post is written on it, using drivel on the Ubuntu Netbook install)
