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Comment by sevenproxies | Hacker News Reader

>and with HP still undecided on the fate of WebOS I’m not going to spend my money on a potential brick

This sounds like a misnomer. Can a device that is primary focused around web-browsers be considered a brick?

And a device that can have Android and Ubuntu/Debian installed on it. The CyanogenMod team is working on porting Ice Cream Sandwich. An openly hackable device lasts much longer than a planned-obsolescence, closed-platform model.

I know the current way to get Ubuntu on it is the chroot method, but why hasn't anyone hacked the WebOS Doctor to have a boot loader to dual boot Ubuntu? Or even have a system like a GDM login that gives the option to start X/Gnome instead of the native environment so you wouldn't need Ubuntu at all?

The reason they use a chroot instead of a native boot is because WebOS has the drivers for the system already loaded. By booting Ubuntu inside of WebOS, they avoid not having compatible drivers for the system inside of Ubuntu. I don't know if all the drivers are open source or if today's announcement will change that.

Ah yeah, I guessed that's why they only had a chroot until now, but what if you modified the system to load X11/Gnome at the end of boot instead of going into their own proprietary desktop environment?

With the announcement of WebOS open source, it should theoretically become possible. Luna is just a desktop environment overtop a fairly normal Linux system. There might need to be a few extra packages installed to get Gnome 3 or Unity running, but as long as they can grab access to the video processor, it should be do-able. One more thing to look forward to.

There's a rumor HP is running Windows 8 on Touchpads internally for development purposes. I've looked but haven't found examples of people installing Win8 on Touchpad. This would be a cheap way to check out the OS on its major intended target form factor for cheap. Any pointers?

If the rumor is true, it's unlikely that you or I would be able to run the system even if we could get it loaded. Windows 8 Dev Preview didn't have drivers for my SATA drive, I doubt it comes preinstalled with drivers for the Touchpad. If HP has it running, it's because they ported their drivers to Windows 8. AFAIK, they have not released those publicly.

It's a bit more future proof than a device missing a browser. However as the browser is not updated, it will lack future technologies.

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