We take a look at Ubuntu for Nexus 7, made possible with the new one-click installer promoted by Canonical. What we found certainly surprised us…
Why Ubuntu?
Ubuntu is second only to Android in terms of Linux popularity. It’s the last, best hope today for saving the PC from a walled garden universe. With Apple and Microsoft now doubling down on their walled gardens, the options to sideload on a PC are quickly dwindling from every-PC to no-PC.
Sideloading is important, it’s something that we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars from big advertisers, because we’re so persistent in our crusade for it. Sideloading ensures you can run software that you want, on your device. A small business can now be destroyed with an App Submission Denied email. It has happened. People, real people, are being bankrupted by this. It’s wrong.
Apple has ensured mobile devices are practically a lost cause, with only Google joining us in our sideloading crusade. Ironically, Apple has embraced sideloading with Gatekeeper on OS X Mountain Lion, trying to play both sides. Windows 8 modern/metro apps are also walled-in. That means all Windows RT desktops and tablets, as well as all Windows Phone 7 and 8 apps.
If you want to sideload on Windows, you basically have to code for Windows 7, not Windows 8. We think that’s wrong, as it ensures sideloading apps that can be made profitable, are on borrowed time in both the PC, and mobile industries.
We know, if you read PhoneNews.com, you’ve read this time and time again. Ubuntu stands alongside Android as one of the only commercially-viable operating systems that is serving as a deterrant to turn the tide on sideloading.
The Installation
To install, you must first unlock your device’s bootloader. Thankfully, with Nexus 7, that is an easy process. You first run the Nexus 7 Ubuntu installer, which of course right now requires you to install Ubuntu. You can do this without installing Ubuntu on your PC by using a Virtual Machine (VM) with the free VirtualBox software. The VM deployment of Ubuntu can pass through USB 2.0 devices, but make sure you install Oracle’s VM additions as well as VirtualBox.
Once you install the Nexus 7 installer, it only takes a couple of quick terminal commands to unlock the bootloader on the Nexus 7. Once done, you are set to run the Ubuntu Nexus 7 Installer.
Google’s unlock-friendly bootloader. You have to start here to allow Ubuntu to be installed on your Nexus 7.
The installer then pulls down pre-built images for Ubuntu ARM 12.10, and flashes them onto the Nexus 7. Canonical notes that the image does use proprietary drivers, including Wi-Fi and Tegra 3 graphics drivers. No open source, non-proprietary alternatives exist today.
Installing Ubuntu for Nexus 7 is a one-stop affair.
Once finished, the device will take several minutes to de-compress the disk images on the device. But, you’re done with the PC. However, we strongly suggest you keep that VM instance or Ubuntu install handy.
This is early software… really early.
We thought we had the holy grail on our hands. Open, OpenGL ES accelerated, true Linux with a Linux userland, and armed with NVIDIA’s Tegra 3. It was supposed to be the last mile between Android and total Linux bliss.
It isn’t any of that.
What we got was a very early, unstable release distribution. Nothing totally works. Where, oh where to begin.
First, while Ubuntu’s GNOME-forked user interface, Unity, was supposed to be OpenGL ES ready, it doesn’t seem to be working properly. Everything is rendering in software mode on Nexus 7, at least, as far as we can tell. We do have to caution this may not totally be Canonical’s fault, NVIDIA has been very poor with its Linux driver support for a good decade or two.
OpenGL ES is totally new territory and a lot of this is going to have to be reverse engineered to talk to a proprietary driver meant for Android. Android and Linux may now have undergone a “kernel unification”, but they are vastly different userlands. We suspect the Tegra 3 driver has no tunings for a traditional flavor of Linux. And, we suspect, bugs in Unity also prevent OpenGL ES from “going live” just yet.
We’d be okay with all that though.
The problems continue, however. First, Unity is set to use the Desktop interface, not Unity’s custom Netbook/Tablet interface. Canonical says they are aware of this, and working on a fix.
Also, the DPI is 1:1 pixel for a desktop. That means icons are smaller than your fingertips. Menu bars are half your fingertip… if you have a small finger. You’re going to need to make some UI adjustments to get the interface functional.
Touch support is dismal. Unity crashes… a lot. The combination of the two is bad. It took three reboots just to get the device through the checks for software updates. None are available as of today.
Some of this can be worked around. USB On The Go (OTG) support is available for Nexus 7. While Bluetooth is too buggy to work (yes, you read that right), you can plug in a keyboard and mouse.
USB OTG works fine, but charging with USB OTG does not. An alpha-grade patch is live already to address that.
So, what we’re left with is a seven inch tablet that works best when paired with the assets of a notebook. And graphics acceleration is absent. Wi-Fi and other features are stable, but showcase how an ARM CPU is different from an x86 CPU. ARM CPUs may be causing laptop and desktop prices (along with x86 CPU prices) to crater. But, that doesn’t mean ARM and x86 are equal. x86 crushes ARM in performance. So, while an x86 tablet with similar clock speeds can load Firefox almost instantly… ARM will take several seconds to load full Firefox.
Oh, and thanks to Adobe pulling out of Flash on traditional Linux, that’s a goner too.
Conclusions
This is for extreme nerds, for now. That will change over time, Ubuntu has tons of promise.
But, the ease of installation betrays the pains after-install. It is going to give many their first taste of Ubuntu… and it’s going to taste like a bar of soap.
We realize Canonical has cautioned all of this. But, if something is easy to install, people are going to ignore that. They may read it, but they’ll dismiss it out of hand. After all, it’s easy to install, so it should just work, right? Unfortunately, that is the flawed psychology that we fear many will take away from this.
We really urge Canonical to offer up a warning page at the start of the Nexus 7 installer, warning how buggy things are right now. Otherwise, they run the risk of turning away a good chunk of the potential future userbase. It’s easy, but it’s not for normal people… just yet.
Hello Chris,
Thanks for taking the time to review the developer release of the core of Ubuntu on the Nexus 7. I led the team that delivered this image, and we’re actually quite proud of what we’ve done.
Our intention and our messaging from the beginning has always been that this is a developer release specifically designed to illustrate how far the core of Ubuntu needs to be improved before it is suitable for mobile devices, and to motivate our developer community to start polishing the rough edges in our core.
We’ve put up extensive documentation in our wiki about all the known issues, linked to our bug tracker, and have stated multiple times that this is a developer release.
To your point that we should install an additional warning in our installer as well, that is a good suggestion and I’ll file a bug for us to do so.
At the same time, I would gently suggest that reviewing an explicit developer release on a website aimed at general consumers is rather unfair. Open source software development necessarily happens in the public purview which has both strengths and weaknesses. While we can harness the power and enthusiasm of our development community by developing in the open, we also run the risk of folks outside our community’s normal borders not fully understanding what we’re trying to do.
Thanks for warning your users to avoid our developer release. When time comes, we’ll happily welcome the general public to use our products, but until then, they should probably stick to the other consumer grade OSes.
cheers,
Alex Chiang
Alex, while I like it when devs sound off… I don’t think you really understood Chris’s conclusions. You attack his review for criticizing your accomplishments in the wrong context.
I don’t think he did that at all. The first half of the review was a Ubuntu lovefest. And, he concluded by saying that this effort was great and showed tons of progress.
PhoneNews.com has been around for a long time, and they aren’t as “general tech” as you seem to think they are. The readers of this site are the very people (like me) that want a working Ubuntu on our tablets. All Chris is saying is that we should hold off, that’s all. He isn’t bashing you or your team’s work. I think if you re-read it, you’ll see he’s doing the opposite.
“At the same time, I would gently suggest that reviewing an explicit developer release on a website aimed at general consumers is rather unfair…” -Alex Chiang
“You attack his review for criticizing your accomplishments in the wrong context…”- Tom S.
You’re way out of line Tom S.
Constructive arguments don’t end with a statement lacking rational. If you don’t like what I said, or want to claim I’m out of line, you’re going to have to do better than that.
[…] Review: Ubuntu for Nexus 7 We take a look at Ubuntu for Nexus 7, made possible with the new one-click installer promoted by Canonical. What we found certainly surprised us… […]
I installed KDE ad it works much faster than Unity. The problem with KDE is that it has some problems with touch functionality.
Very important to install ssh-server so you can manipulate the device without using the screen incase you lose control.
Overall I was impressed with how much works. It needs a few months of wrok to clean up the touch routines, and other small areas.
Version 1.1 of the Nexus 7 Ubuntu Installer was issued, I can confirm it adds the changes Alex noted above.
Primarily, the installer now adds the following caution:
Thanks for the quick turnaround on that, Alex.
P.S. A changelog would be nice for future releases, keep installer and image changes tracked so users can monitor progress so they can decide if they should install/retry each release.
A great review. Exactly the way I saw when I first installed. I think it needs a lot of work before goes into the regular user. But it is a good start by Ubuntu to port into ARM and Google Nexus 7 is a great device to start with.
[…] Complete Story […]
We don’t plan on maintaining that particular installer for much longer.
After our currently running developer conference in Copenhagen ends and we all go home, we’re going to start upstreaming our work into standard Ubuntu, and there is work planned to update our standard installer (usb-creator) so that it can directly flash the Nexus using fastboot.
The Ubuntu update model doesn’t require a new installation for a new release. Once the machine is installed, users will just get updates via our standard software update process.
thanks.
My KDE running netbook is 4years old and might buy a tablet if I can run a real OS next to Chrome so Im gonna wait till I can dual booth ChromeOS with Kubuntu lets say.
Besides, Google doesnt play nice with .odf in any of its services now so I still need a real word processor but dual boot is my tipping point.
Heya Chris — The sources are posted here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-nexus7/ubuntu-nexus7/ubuntu-nexus7-installer … changelog updates will also migrate their way to the same location but as Alex mentioned there are larger plans to utilize tools like usb-creator to achieve the same results. This utility was put together to make folks lives a bit easier when testing this development release.
Cheers,
Chris
really appreciate the honest review. funny watching that alex chang guy get all pissy about constructive criticism
haha.
“Tom S” and “ryan villegas”: you are both indeed out of the line. Alex clearly isn’t “attacking” or “pissy” at all. Instead he is bringing up a good point of view in a very polite manner, and at the same time promising to move forward Christopher’s idea of a warning in the installer.
Having ubuntu on the nexus would be awesome! Actually I messed a bit with this release, and I was even able to have it run a fully working ruby/rails/mysql/nodejs stack! And I can assure you that performance was not an issue.
Now I’m flashing android back, as not having right click and zoom makes this release too hard to use.
PS : would ubuntu server be available for the nexus 7 in the future?
Chris –
Thanks for a great review and for supporting side loading. I remember when you were the first to seemingly raise this issue back when Windows 7 was announced and the first developer editions began to flow. It is great to know that you are still championing this cause for the masses. Thanks.
–Steve