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I'm thinking to buy one of these cheap chinese netbooks, they run android, ideal for university, so I won't have to carry my laptop.

I want to remove android, and install Ubuntu derivatives, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, but most probably xubuntu, Lubuntu isn't much lighter as far as I know.

Will the ARM version work? Or Linux can't be installed on such devices? what I'm looking at is more of a mobile tablet than a laptop. Knowing that Linux can't be installed on mobiles got me thinking about the possible issue.

If the problem was about the requirements, I'd install debian or build Gentoo and make the lightest weight distro ever, but I think it's not about how heavy the distro is, it's about whether linux runs on mobile like laptops or not, besides Xubuntu is pretty much as lightweight as it gets especially when using the mini CD

Braiam
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Lynob
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  • What device, exactly? Is this a phone, tablet, or laptop? And if it runs Android, what version? – landroni Mar 14 '14 at 22:30
  • Best would be to try a LiveUSB on this machine to see if it works as expected. – landroni Mar 14 '14 at 22:33
  • @landroni I dont want to order something unless I'm so sure that linux will work, android is a useless OS when installed on a netbook, I cant think of a single reason to buy an android netbook – Lynob Mar 14 '14 at 22:35
  • Android has a Linux kernel, so for sure there is a Linux working on it. Almost for sure, though, they do not have an AMD/Intel CPU, so eventually you will need to rebuild the kernel to use Ubuntu on them. Maybe (but I'm totally not sure about that) some other distros would fit better for the support of CPU and other hardwares. – dadexix86 Mar 14 '14 at 22:52
  • @dadexix86 like what OS? – Lynob Mar 14 '14 at 22:55
  • It depends on the CPU and other hardware that they mount. Try to contact the seller and ask exactly for the tech specs, since they are totally not clear from the website above :) – dadexix86 Mar 14 '14 at 22:58
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    It's really clear. That VIA laptop is ARM based. Ubuntu killed the full desktop ARM branch, so you're stuck trying to home-brew something that boots on ARM with whatever bootloader this box has. Totally not worth it in my opinion. – RobotHumans Mar 14 '14 at 23:08
  • @hbdgaf true arm not amd, i made a mistake :) – Lynob Mar 14 '14 at 23:25

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Before buying a laptop, make sure that you do some due diligence by checking if its hardware components are known to be supported by Linux: At Present Which is the best choice for a Ubuntu graphics card, AMD or nVidia?. Numerous hardware compatibility lists exist on the web (I'm not sure which is the most useful), including Phoronix.

If the device that you're looking into has an ARM-based processor, then you might want to look at ARM Processor support on the wiki.

Another avenue would be Ubuntu Touch. They even talk about Ubuntu for Android. For a list of compatible devices check Ubuntu Touch devices support on the wiki (they also have a mailing list) and these related questions:

Community
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landroni
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yea you would have to check the chip set to see if Ubuntu software will run on it. Most likely it will, but I would double check with the seller to see if it can use another OS.

Digitalrazr
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