Today I ported Ubuntu Natty 11.04 to a REAL tablet. It’s a WeTab, that normally ships with Meego. As you well know, Nokia decided to switch to Windows Mobile and basically stopped MeeGo development on their side leaving Intel alone on the project.
I tried in the past with the Folio 100, but things are slow because it’s based on the nVidia Tegra2: good processor, but not easy to handle. I hope there will be something with FreeScale i.MX51 (or later), which is a processor I had some experience with.
Anyway, as WeTab it’s an Intel Atom processor, it was quite easy to port Natty on it, once you understand the process of booting off the USB adapter. It’s for sure far easier of other ARM processors, although Atom it’s more hungry on power consumption.
The final result is in the photo aside and I think it’s a good result: most of the functionalities works like a charm, such as bluetooth, wi-fi, video, …. for the keyboard emulation, I used florence, although it has some bugs related to the new qt-based Unity interface (it was designed for gnome). Natty is really towards a real tablet edition and unified experience across devices, we’ll see more with the next release: stay tuned for more UDS report 🙂
DISCLAIMER: this is not an official Canonical porting, it’s just my own effort to run this tablet.