Spark tablet runs Linux, costs £165

Ripe for home-brew softwareTablets News By Jools Whitehorn Monday at 09:31 UTC | Tell us what you think [ 2 comments ]

Tweet Feel free to tinker

Details of the Spark Linux-based tablet have emerged which actively encourages users to play with its software.

The 7-inch tablet will be running an open-source OS based on Linux, called KDE Plasma Active UX.

The new slate is aimed at those who like to tinker with their tablets, allowing users to program their own software in Linux without having to go in the back door by rooting their devices as you'd have to in Android or iOS.

The Spark has an 800 x 480px screen with a 1.3 megapixel camera for video calling. Inside, there's a 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor with a Mali-400 GPU and 500MB of RAM.

There's also 4GB of internal storage, with room for more via an SD card slot.

The tablet will go on sale for €200 (£165) across Europe, with pre-order starting this week and it's expected to start delivery in May.

Free to do what you want to do

The Spark was announced by KDE developer Aaron Siego, who says, "this is a unique opportunity for Free software. Finally we have a device coming to market on our terms. It has been designed by and is usable by us on our terms."

"We are not waiting for some big company to give us what we desire, we're going out there and making it happen together. Just as important: the proceeds will be helping fuel the efforts that make this all possible."

The Plasma OS has been adapted to work on a variety of devices including netbooks and televisions. The Spark comes with Plasma Active which is tailored specifically to tablet use.

From Asiego via netbooknews.com

Tags: spark, tablet, plasma, linux, open sourceTweetreddit!StumbleuponComment on this article  Your comments (2) Click to add a new commentfoxmeister

Monday at 12:42 UTC

2. This sounded really interesting up to the point I saw the screen resolution is only 800x480.

I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but having owned a 7" Galaxy Tab, and a 7" HTC Flyer with their 1024x600 screens, I don't think 800x480 really cuts it at 7", regardless of price point.

I would pay more for a higher resolution screen.

It's a shame, because otherwise this sounds like a nice device!

Alert a moderator

simon_m

Monday at 09:55 UTC

1. Want.

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In Depth: 13 weird and wonderful niche Linux distros

13 niche Linux distros

Here are 13 of the best, oddest and most useful distributions that Linux has to offer, and why on Earth you'd want to use them.

Red Star OS

One distro that's never going to trouble the top of the Distrowatch rankings chart is Red Star OS. This is the Linux distribution that was developed/is being developed as the officially sanctioned operating system of North Korea, apparently at the behest of Kim Jong-Il, the country's leader.

It's based on the familiar KDE 3.x, but with added touches including the Woodpecker antivirus software and the Pyongyang Fortress firewall.

Familiar apps have been renamed too: there's a notebook app called My Comrade, and Firefox is called My Country (perhaps fittingly, as North Korea has its own internet). We searched for 'Democracy' in the default search engine, but nothing came up…

MuLinux

The classically educated might be able to guess that this is a small distro, possibly in the same vein as Puppy or Damn Small Linux. You'd have difficulty, however, comprehending just how small it is. MuLinux requires 20MB hard disk space and 4MB RAM, and will run on an Intel 80386 processor or later.

That's the same Intel 80386 processor that was released in 1985, meaning Mu will breathe life into even ancient hardware. Mu is no match for a modern system in terms of productivity, having been finished in 1998-99, but if you have a 25-year-old machine that you want to rescue from the scrapheap, it's the distro for you.

Ubuntu Satanic Edition

Ubuntu spin-offs are ten-a-penny, but we have to recognise that the makers of Ubuntu SE have gone beyond the ordinary in their quest to please The Dark One. The dark theme and collection of background images is the most obvious modification, and the sound effects and startup jingle have also been customised.

Ubuntu's fondness for alliteration is still there (the last three releases have been Lucifer's Legion, Microsoft Massacre and Necrophilic Necromancer), but the version numbers have been modified to 666.8, 666.9 and 666.10 respectively.

Oh, and it doesn't have live CDs; they're "undead". Endearingly bonkers.

GoboLinux

One for the techies, this: the thing that marks GoboLinux out from the rest is its filesystem layout. Most Linux distributions use an archaic non-arrangement wherein an application's files are scattered around your hard drive in several different folders.

GoboLinux adopts an OS X-like approach (which Apple took from RISC OS), and stores all files associated with an application in a single folder in /Programs.

GNewSense

If you like software freedom, you'll love GNewSense. It's based on Ubuntu, but has had all non-free software removed, including those tricky non-free driver files that are loaded into the Linux kernel (known as binary blobs). Unfortunately, many of these blobs are drivers for wireless networking cards, so GNewSense may not be the best distro for laptops.

On the plus side, it has removed or renamed software that doesn't fit the Free Software Foundation's definition of freedom (Firefox, for example, is renamed as Burning Dog), and it doesn't provide any links to non-free repositories, making it even more free than Debian.

Until we get the Hurd to replace the Linux kernel and create Gnu/Hurd, GNewSense (and Trisquel, a similar project based on Debian with a much cooler logo) is the closest we'll get to completely free.

Sabily/Ubuntu Christian Edition

Formerly known as Ubuntu Islamic Remix, Sabily is Ubuntu with extra Islam. The theme is Islamic green, the Applications menu has been expanded to include a selection of Quran study/prayer-time software, and the DansGuardian web filtering tool has been given an easy-to-use front end in the shape of Webstrict.

Ubuntu Christian Edition is, perhaps not surprisingly, the equivalent for Christians, and features religious study tools as well as improved web filtering (Ubuntu CE's DansGuardian UI is what inspired the developers of Sabily to include their own).

We also have to tip our hat to Jewbuntu, simply for having such an inspired name.

Yellow Dog

Originally released in the late 90s for Apple computers using the PowerPC chip architecture, Yellow Dog found its niche among people who wanted an even more different way to think differently. All was good, but then Apple abandoned PowerPC in favour of Intel chips, which it's still using today.

This left Yellow Dog out in the cold, but after a change of ownership it re-invented itself as an OS for high-performance multicore computing - most notably as the OS used on PlayStations hooked up to form cheap supercomputing grids.

Mikebuntu

We blow our own trumpet so rarely round here that we'd almost forgotten where we put it, but it's worth shouting about the work that disc monkey Mike Saunders puts into the DVD for TechRadar's sister title, Linux Format, every month. Mike packs the distro on the free DVD with extra PDFs, extra software, extra desktop environments and heaps more extra options. We love you, Mike.

Gentoo

We love the freedom that we have to modify and recompile source code according to our needs, but very few of us actually do this, because it's easier to just download a Deb or RPM file. The lazy majority would not like Gentoo - or Linux For Masochists, as it's sometimes known - for the simple fact that you have to compile it yourself.

That's not just the apps - it's the whole thing, including the kernel and all the other bits of your current distro that most people take for granted. The point of this is that if your Linux distro is compiled for your exact hardware, it should be possible to wring every last drop of performance from your kit. You just need to make sure that you have a large supply of coffee to hand before you attempt to install it.

And yes, we know that there are versions of Gentoo in existence that are easier to use, but they're not really Gentoo now, are they?

Scientific Linux

There still exists among our Windows-using cousins the risible idea that Linux isn't good enough to take over on the desktop; that the continued dominance of Microsoft on the desktop is inevitable, because Linux is not up to the job technically. This can easily be refuted: the cleverest people on the planet - the scientists searching for clues about the beginning of the universe - use Scientific Linux at the CERN laboratories.

It's based on Red Hat, and anyone can download and install it on their machine. You don't even need a PhD in theoretical physics.

Parted Magic

We're sure that nobody runs this as their full-time operating system (if you do, get in touch and tell us why), so although it's technically a distro, it's best thought of as a specialist tool.

Parted Magic is a live distro that comes with all the tools you need to fix broken partitions. If something won't boot, this is what you use to fix it, and that goes for both Linux and Windows machines. As a troubleshooting aid, it's indispensable.

Bodhi Linux

Before Unity, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came along and showed the world what it was missing, the Linux desktop was a staid place, enlivened only by the ongoing flame wars between KDE and Gnome users. This is odd, because as long ago as 1997 we had a far glitzier alternative: Enlightenment.

Enlightenment is a window manager, and is beautiful without distracting you from the task in hand or forcing you to adopt your way of working to it. And the best way to get it is to install Bodhi Linux, which is why it's on this list.

Umpteen Ubuntu remixes

It's often said that there's too much choice in Linuxland, but the truth is actually that there's too much duplication. Each of the distros featured in this list fulfils a need, and brings something new to the party. But there are many, many more that don't.

If you're thinking of remixing your favourite distro to give it an Xfce or LXD E desktop, don't: because someone will already have done it; and we don't need any more dead wood clogging up the internet.

Opinion: How to make Linux the preferred desktop choice

How to make Linux the preferred desktop choice

The fight for the desktop might be entering its final phase, but not in the way any of us could have imagined 10 years ago.

In an interview at www.derstandard.at, for example, KDE's Aaron Siego said that the desktop is losing importance in the same way as newspapers, and after a conversation with Miguel de Icaza, Tim Anderson posted on his blog that the former Gnome founder felt that many of the benefits in open source development had played against the success of Linux on the desktop.

According to Miguel, this was because of fragmentation (my word) in the number of times we break the APIs for developers, and the cycle of upgrades that cause incompatibility between distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution.

Even suggesting that there's too much choice is controversial, as I've found out in the past, and Miguel has brewed a small storm with his statements. But there are two elements in his argument that change the angle, and I think set a new challenge for both Linux and Windows for the next 10 years.

The first is connected to the idea that the desktop is beginning to matter less - a point also made by Rob Pike at Google and many others since the release of the iPad. But it's important to differentiate between what might be seen as a fad for tablet computing and the obvious target for any desktop growth, and the increased pervasiveness of all technology in our lives.

It's not just smartphones that replace PCs - you could just as easily accuse internet enabled televisions, games consoles and satellite receivers of stealing desktop market share. But what these devices have really done is take an application off the desktop and move it into a more convenient form factor - regardless of whether that's a TV for YouTube or a fridge for recipes.

The result is that we no longer have as much need to sit down formally at a desk and use the computer. That doesn't mean they're becoming redundant - they're just becoming more specialised, and that leads to another of Miguel's issues.

Not enough good apps

"When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10. [If] you work really hard, you can probably name 20," he's quoted as saying. There's a lack of killer applications for Linux.

I think he's right. If applications are becoming less PC-centric, we need better reasons for using a desktop. Linux faces an uncommon challenge when you need a solid excuse to use one particular system over another, especially when it requires more effort to configure and set up.

The challenge is that I don't think we'll see that killer application. Any application worth the effort will be ported to both Windows and OS X, as has happened with many of the most popular open source projects.

Major releases of software like Audacity, Inkscape, Scribus, LibreOffice and Ardour are almost certainly downloaded more hungrily for systems other than Linux, at least initially (and we won't go into why you can't just download a package and install it on any Linux system).

That's a good thing. Free software is about more than just an operating system, and the more that can be done to unshackle users from proprietary alternatives or pressure their developers to be more open, the happier we'll all be.

All about the desktop

For that reason, the killer application has to be the desktop. The desktop is the best expression of the freedom found within the kernel, as well as community user interface design. It's what makes Linux different from the alternatives, and it has to be the reason why you want to choose it over Windows or OS X.

And while freedom is obviously a big motivation, both in cost and in the availability of the source code, when you move away from software idealism, there needs to be something else.

The problem is that this 'something else' is missing. There is no single desktop you can point to and say 'look at Linux'. Which is a pity, because there's great potential in the Gnome and KDE desktops that will likely be the inspiration behind many new features in their competitors.

Look at the drag-down task switching in Plasma Active, for example, or the touch scrolling for desktop windows, and I bet you'll see replicas of these functions in future versions of either OS X or Windows.

The trick has to be getting people to the Linux desktop first, and making it their preferred environment for desktop tasks like office work and browsing. We shouldn't get distracted by tablets and iOS, and should instead use the genius of open source software to create a singularly awesome desktop that everyone wants to use.