Archos is a French company that we know as a maker of affordable Android tablets, but now they made the news through an OS port. I’m talking about the port of Ubuntu 11.10 to the Archos Gen 8 tablets. These slates haven’t even received Android 4.0 and it’s hard to think they would, since the tablets are from back in 2010.
XDA Developers member CalcProgrammer1 is the one who brought Linux to the Archos 43 tablet, that’s probably the only device with a 4.3 inch out there to be called “tablet” and not “smartphone”. This device usually runs Android 2.2 Froyo and comes with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels, 8/16GB of internal memory, a 1GHZ ARM Cortex A8 CPU, WiFi and Bluetooth. The same port applies to the 10 inch Archos 101 model, in case you’re wondering. We’ve got a video below showing Ubuntu in action on the Archos 43 and the basic features are available, stuff such as the touchscreen, WiFi and Bluetooth.
Screen rotation is also available, but hardware graphics acceleration and a bunch more features are lacking. Android is designed specifically for mobile devices, like phones and tablets, so bringing Ubuntu, a desktop-based OS to a tablet is no easy feat, I’ll give you that. The most important problem with Ubuntu on the tablet is the optimization of the platform for this tiny resolution. The Archos Gen8 family also includes 2.8 inch, 3.2 inch and 7 inch units.
