Famous platform Ubuntu was recently caught running on the more famous Nexus 7 tablet from Google, the famous bundle of joy made by ASUS and supposed to get a 32 GB version soon. Just for the sake of knowing what we’re dealing with, in terms of hardware, know that Nexus 7 offers a 1.2 GHz quad core Tegra 3 processor and 1 GB of RAM, plus an unlocked bootloader.
Thus, it’s easy to port any touch based OS on the device, other than Android. This is not the first time Ubuntu has been applied to an ARM-based mobile device, since devs have been playing with it on the Nexus S handset back in January 2011, for example. Early builds of Arch, Debian and Ubuntu have also appeared on the HP TouchPad, that has become sort of a “developer’s device” lately, since I’ve seen it part of a lot of software experiments.
It’s not yet clear why Canonical and its founder Mark Shuttleworth want Ubuntu on tablets and handsets, but it may just be the idea of making the platform look more tablet friendly. Maybe they’ll sneak on Windows RT tablets as well soon. With Android and iOS leading the mobile market right now and possibly Windows RT placing third soon, I doubt there’s any room for Linux up there….
