Philip,
I came across this thread and wanted to give it a bump to see how you made out with your tablet choice.
I personally have have horrible success trying to get Linux on this unit:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA7CY4GG2273
The issue is this SDIO- from Ubuntu to Arch, Android x86 and even Linuxium, the issue is the touchscreen and wireless driver if the tab boots at all. Zero help from the Onda forums on what exactly is needed and at this point the only thing that works is the Windows 10 crap. I can't even download an original image so I can get the Android side booting again. I can't tell you why it stop booting since all my tests were from Live CD's but I might have flipped something in the bios. When I have time I've have to check but for now I had to step away from this because I was too frustrated.
Despite good build quality I couldn't recommend Onda as a vendor- even if I was a fan of Windows tablets. It been a very long time since I've had such a poor tech experience.
I'm hoping you or someone else has some good feedback on other tablets that can run Linux.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Keith C. Perry, MS E.E.
From: "Philip Rushik" <prushik@gmail.com>
To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2016 6:07:36 PM
Subject: [PLUG] Making android tablets do what I want
Hey everybody.
Made a Black Friday Thursday purchase this year, oops. Got a 72$ SmarTab Android 2 in 1 tablet. The thing runs on an Intel x86_64 processor, so I figured it should be no problem to get it running real Linux since the x86 booting situation is much better than arm and arm64, and MS actually requires x86 devices to have an open boot process now, but this is an android only device. I'm very confused by it so far, because although its a x86 device, the boot process seems very much like any arm based android device. Holding down the volume buttons on boot gets me to an android recovery mode, and it seems to have fastboot mode also, and I haven't figured out any more of the boot process, or even if its bios based or uefi based.
My plan is to get it rooted first of all, and then get busybox installed (it already has busybox, but its a very limited configuration) and see if I can figure out if its uefi or bios, and then from there replace the bootloader with something that I know (grub). But anybody have any better ideas? anybody have experience making these things do real work instead of android?
I also can't get adb to recognize it while in recovery mode (for adb sideload), though it works fine while powered on fully, just no root access.
Thanks everybody,
--Phil
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