Dual-Booting PengPod Tablet Can Run Linux/Android

New submitter garbagechuteflyboy writes "The PengPod is the first dual-booting tablet; It's able to run both Linux and Android. Pengpod is now running the latest Plasma Active which gives this powerful Linux tablet features that were previously only available to iPad and Android tablets. PengPod is currently selling pre-orders on Indiegogo." garbagechuteflyboy adds links to articles about the dual-OS tablet at liliputing, at Ars Technica, and at PCWorld. "First dual-booting tablet" seems like a hard claim to back, but it's nice to see a tablet marketed with Plasma Active in mind.

The PengPod folks are vague

[bogaboga]

Our goal is to build a powerful, True Linux Tablet, one free of Android's restrictions, at a reasonable price.

Why won't they list the so called "Android's restrictions?"

They appear to have made up this statement...just for fun.

Re:Resistive Screen

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to sign up for one of these earlier this week, but the specs seem to indicate a resistive screen. After trying one of the cheap Chinese made Android tabs with a resistive screen, no thanks. I could deal with a bit less speed or memory, but the screen's got to be capacitive.

It has a capacitive screen

Dupe

[Narishma]

garbagechuteflyboy adds links to articles about the dual-OS tablet at liliputing, at Ars Technica, and at PCWorld.

How about a link to Slashdot [slashdot.org]'s story a week ago.

Re:you mean GNU and Android

[darkNeko]

It's important because it's target as you say it's not for consumers, but for geeks. The differences are significant if you want to develop for one or the other, specially if you want to use X vs whatever android uses. You can easily port thousands of apps that use X, but those same apps are a pain to port to android. I, as profesional could use a tablet with full linux, where I can use some software does the work I need, with a simple recompile, instead of having to port it to android with several different libraries and subsystems.

Slashdot doing advertorials now?

[BenJeremy]

Chinese tablets have been doing this for ages. I have a 7" tablet I bought a few years ago that ...GASP... boots THREE Operating Systems!! Android, Windows CE, and Linux.

This is absolutely nothing new or unique. Quite frankly, I'm astonished this is being covered by Slashdot like this, unless they are getting advertising revenues from the HK vendor that sells it.

Re:Resistive Screen

[drachensun]

Its in the updates on the site: Q: Do the PengPods use a capacitive touch screen? A: YES, no resistive touch screens, only capacitive. I think some confusion has been caused by the fact that the A10 chip has a built in resistive touch screen controller. We are not using it, we are using an ft5x capacitive touch screen controller chip with 5 point multi-touch.

Re:you mean GNU and Android

[squirrelthetire]

people have a tendency to forget that Android is Linux.

No, It's an OS that uses Linux for a kernel. That's an important distinction that people tend to forget, mostly because of the fact that until Android, just about any OS using Linux also used GNU. With that fact changing, people should realize that GNU/Linux and Android/Linux are different, and therefore incompatible.

Re:First?

[Boltronics]

"Used to"? I'm still rocking the N900, with Maemo and Debian GNU/Linux wheezy dual-boot.

There's also Arch, Ubuntu, etc. Many also run one of these distributions in a Maemo chroot. I bet it would have WebOS ported to it if only it had more power. Android is also ported via Nitdroid (although I hear newer versions such as ICS run too slowly).