Ubuntu 10.10 Demoed on a Toshiba AC100 Smartbook

One of the cool aspects of open source software is that it encourages people to tinker with and not just use it as intended. A result of such tinkering can be seen in this video form Carrypad demonstrating the current Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 based Toshiba AC100 smartbook.

After a few days of testing Ubuntu 10.10 in the AC100 Chippy concludes that it's certainly not ready to use for the majority of customers, but a productive experience is possible through desktop Linux and Web based applications. As you can see in the video the processing power of this dual-core device is pretty impressive when rendering heavy Web pages and applications, though it certainly helps that Flash is not supported right now in Ubuntu for ARM devices.

If you want to try this yourself, be aware that you need a new bootloader, which is not without risk, some NVIDIA Tegra tools, and an Ubuntu built for ARMv7 on an SD card. For further details and links to software sources and howtos, read Chippy's initial article about the AC100 Ubuntu hack.