I’ve installed Ubuntu on my Toshiba AC100 ‘smartbook’ and I’m accessing my WordPress back-end via Firefox 3.6. This is a test to see if I can create and post an entry.
You should see a photo on the right (uploaded from the filesystem on the AC100)
Wifi is obviously working and considering i’m running this from an SD card the experience isn’t too bad. It’s locking-up from time to time as the OS works with the filesystem but i’m seeing some quite impressive CPU-related performance.
An interesting example of the performance is the SunSpider result i’ve just got from Firefox 3.6. Its the fastest result i’ve ever seen on an ARM-based device.
Click to enlarge that image and click here to view the gallery i’m creating as I go. (You’ll see OpenOffice is working!)
This feels like a seminal moment for productive smart-books. There’s lots to fix and improve but for a base install, i’m impressed.
October 3rd, 2010 at 3:59 am
Sweet, I’m ordering mine tonight. Any tips for getting one in the USA? The only place I’ve found that will ship here is conics.net.
How long does it take OpenOffice to start?
October 3rd, 2010 at 4:03 am
Sorry for the double post… Could we get a video?
October 3rd, 2010 at 4:05 am
Wow, I can’t read. You already answered that.
October 3rd, 2010 at 5:27 am
Do you know if 3d graphics acceleration is working? You can try doing “glxinfo”?
October 3rd, 2010 at 6:12 am
Chippy, you get United States love all day! Since there is room in side of the unit do you think the SD card or maybe a ssd could be modded internally for boot use?
October 3rd, 2010 at 10:58 am
Can/Did you try to use Ubuntu as a live system? While booting is pretty slow, I got the subjective feeling that an SD Card with live-system and casper-rw partition has better performance.
October 3rd, 2010 at 11:01 am
4.8sec on this sunspider test is quite good … I got 3.2sec on my p1610 running windows fennec 1.2beta
October 3rd, 2010 at 11:08 am
(for completeness sake I got 3.1sec running firefox 3.6.10)
October 3rd, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Battery life?
How is Netbook Remix?
October 3rd, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Had a day off today but i’m planning to do more testing and get a video together tomorrow. Current status is no reason to buy an AC100 but i guess progress will accelerate from here.
October 3rd, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Your progress on this device amazes me, I hope you can keep up the good work with this.
I noticed that flash hasn’t been ported over yet. Have you tried to install Gnash instead?
October 4th, 2010 at 4:03 am
I have used sharp netwalker’s flash light on a couple different arm devices. You might want to try it. jkkmobile.com hosts a copy @ http://www2.jkkmobile.com/FlashLite3.1_Firefox_plugin.tar.gz
October 4th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
About the IO lockups; have you tried different IO schedulers, eg the “noop” scheduler?
October 5th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Chippy,
Thanks a lot for that. Ive been waiting for centuries for ubuntu on an ARM laptop.
Can you please run some benchmarks using phoronix test suite? Its in the repo’s or get it here:
http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/
You can upload the results to phoronix so it can be compared with other platforms. THis would be extremely interesting to see.
Thanks again!
October 6th, 2010 at 12:01 am
eek. Its a huge install. Trying now for you.
October 6th, 2010 at 12:16 am
Looks like the Ubuntu repo version is out of date. “Tests response is: An outdated version of the Phoronix…..”
Is there a simpler test we can do?
October 27th, 2010 at 8:18 am
Late reply, not sure if you are still reading but you can download the latest version here:
http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=downloads
Just grab the ubuntu package (~500Kb), I think it should run on ARM too. Once installed, open a terminal and type
phoronix-test-suite list-tests
That will list all available tests. To run one type
phoronix-test-suite benchmark
October 27th, 2010 at 3:19 am
Great stuff,
I believe Sony is picking up on it.
What I would be very interested in is putting Jolicloud on the AC10. This is a cloudbased OS based on Ubuntu that is far superior and much faster.
Here some links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLmt8XH8L-Y
http://www.jolicloud.com/
January 23rd, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Hi,
I am using a HP Compaq AirLife 100. Original with Android 1.6. It has a similar ARM processor: Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon with 1 GHz. Is there a chance to run this Ubuntu 10.10 for me?
January 23rd, 2011 at 1:36 pm
The boot hacking process will be total different on the Airlife. Its a good device though. Better battery life than AC100 plus you have the touchscreen.did it ever get android 2.2?
January 23rd, 2011 at 2:14 pm
I never tried Android other than the original 1.6. HP does not deliver a better one. You know something about the boot hacking process?
I tried with home+power buttons to get in recovery mode. Then you can choose:
ALT+L menu of actions
ALT*W wipe factory reset
ALT*S apply sdcard:update.zip
January 23rd, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Sorry. I have no idea how to hack the Airlife 100. I forgot its 1.6 too. Wow.