Ubuntu Linux, Android could give HP's TouchPad new life

HP's ill-fated TouchPad may be a hot commodity now that it's being offered at fire-sale prices, but those lucky enough to get their hands on one could soon find themselves with more choices than they ever imagined.

WebOS is the operating system that comes preloaded on the device, of course, and I maintain hope that that Linux-based operating system will be picked up and continued by another company, preferably in open source form.

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For those concerned about WebOS's fate or even just its relative paucity of apps, however, two new possibilities have just emerged. First, it's already possible to get Ubuntu Linux up and running on the device, and second, a project is now in the works to port Android over as well.

Developers involved in Touchdroid plan first to use Android 2.3 Gingerbread and be AOSP-based; once they're able to successfully boot Android, they plan to move to a CM7 base. Honeycomb andIce Cream Sandwich versions will follow from there, the developers explained.

Still unclear on this end is whether Android will replace WebOS or be a dual-boot option as in the Ubuntu solution.

Meanwhile, at least one bounty has been separately offered up to the developer who gets Android working on the HP TouchPad.

Manufacturers, take note
However these two alternate platforms for the TouchPad play out, it's exciting to see three Linux-based operating systems vying to run on HP's discontinued hardware.

I really hope other tablet manufacturers are paying attention. If ever there was proof that there's plenty of demand for an inexpensive, Linux-based tablet option, this is it.

The Ubuntu option
On the Ubuntu side, instructions have already been posted on Liliputing for installing Ubuntu Linux on the TouchPad alongside its existing WebOS operating system. Basically, it sounds like you're creating a dual-boot scenario so that you can choose which to run.

PreWare, Palm Novacom, Xecutah, and Ubuntu 11.04 CHroot are all part of the process, which is reportedly not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, the end result is a command-line version of Ubuntu Linux that can be used with apt-get install to install various Ubuntu software packages.

While not all Ubuntu apps will work on the TouchPad because of its ARM-based processor,Firefox, Chromium, and LibreOffice are among those that do, according to Liliputing's report.

An Android alternative
Aiming to get Android up and running on HP's device, meanwhile, are several hacker efforts, including the nascent Touchdroid project on RootzWiki.

Java 7: What's in it for developers

Although the release late last month of Java SE 7 did not come off without a hitch -- serious bugs turned up in the release candidate and had to be fixed in the Update 1 release -- the platform nonetheless offers developers a variety of enticing capabilities that range from programming improvements to boosts for sound applications and multicore systems.

Officially known as Java Platform Standard Edition 7, Java SE 7 is the first big release of Java in more than five years and the first under Oracle's stewardship. It offers improvements for running dynamic languages, programming, and file systems.

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Java community politics delayed many new features Java founder James Gosling, who left Oracle in 2010 and had limited involvement in developing Java SE 7, views the upgrade as critical simply because Oracle finally got it done: "Java SE 7 is important not for any particular feature but for the fact that Oracle was able to bust the political logjam in the JCP [Java Community Process] that had delayed it for so very long." Al Hilwa, an IDC analyst, agrees: "The main thing about Java SE is that it shipped. The inertia of five years without a release had to be overcome."

Despite the five years of effort, Java SE 7 is not what had been originally planned. Many features in the original JDK 7 plan have been pushed to JDK 8, which is due in 2012. Java SE 7 is thus in some ways the first of a two-part release. That's not necessarily a bad thing, says Rob Ratcliff, founder of the Austin Java Users Group and a Java developer. "It was good for Oracle to release Java 7 and move onto [Java] 8 later." He prefers the evolutionary approach to Java's development.

Among the delayed capabilities are adding Lambda expressions, or "closures," to Java for multicore programming, language and VM support for modular programming, and a module system for the JDK.

Still, Java SE 7 does offer useful new capabilities today.

Key new capability: Support for dynamic languagesA key feature of Java SE 7 is its accommodations for dynamic languages, which are becoming prominent on the JVM lately, thanks to the emergence of languages such as JRuby and Groovy. For example, the new InvokeDynamic capability supports implementation of dynamically typed, object-oriented languages. InvokeDynamic bytecode supports "efficient and flexible execution of method invocations in the absence of static type information," says the Java Specification Request 292, the standards document detailing the capability. Hilwa says dynamic language support is the most important feature in the Java SE 7 release because it will help expand the Java ecosystem.

Key new capability: Better multicore and parallelism supportA multicore-ready API in the release, from the Fork/Join Framework, lets developers more easily decompose problems into tasks for parallel execution across multiple processor cores. IDC analyst Hilwa calls the multicore and parallels capabilities "the most innovative additions" in Java SE 7, and they will let developers "harness underlying multicore processors better."

Key new capability: Compiler optimizations for developer productivityDeveloper productivity also is aided in Java SE 7, via Project Coin, which adds language changes to simplify common programming tasks and reduce coding. It clarifies syntax and makes the code easier to read, says Austin User Group chief Ratcliff.

Project Coin's diamond syntax for constructor calls lets the compiler infer type arguments, and the try-with-resources statement helps the compiler make reliable code by automatically closing files, sockets, and database connections when developers forget to do this, Ratcliff says: "That's something that's been tripping up developers -- especially young developers -- for years. That'll be a good productivity improvement and will reduce bugs."

Key new capabilities: File I/O, graphics, and sound boosts"I'm particularly a fan of the NIO2 [file-system capabilities]," says Java founder Gosling. The new NIO2 capabilities provide an interface for working with file systems that can access more file attributes and offer more information about errors, Oracle's documentation says.

Java advocate Peter Lawrey, author of the Vanilla Java blog, cites Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) capabilities as important for network file I/O. "SDP is really there to improve support for Infiniband," he says. Infiniband is a competitor to iSCSI that has been making some headway in virtualization environments.

Java SE 7 also features the XRender pipeline for 2D graphics rendering; it runs on top of the X Window system and can access modern graphics processors.

Explain of Top 10 Business Networking Terms

1. DNS

The Domain Name System, which is responsible for determining the corresponding IP address when you type a site name like www.smallbusinesscomputing.com into a browser. DNS service is typically provided by an ISP (though many small businesses also run DNS internally to locate resources on corporate networks), and it can often be a source of poor browsing performance and intermittent site connectivity problems.

Free or inexpensive alternative DNS providers like ClearCloud, Google Public DNS or OpenDNS can provide speedier and more reliable website access, protection against malware and phishing pages, as well as enhanced features like Web content filtering and activity logging.

2. Dual-Band Wi-Fi

This refers to 802.11n-compatible Wi-Fi hardware that can utilize two distinct frequencies -- the standard 2.4 GHz frequency used by 802.11b/g, and/or the 5 GHz frequency used by 802.11a. Although 5 GHz Wi-Fi devices generally have a shorter range than their 2.4 GHz counterparts, using the 5 GH z frequency can still be beneficial because it provides higher capacity -- i.e. more access points in a given amount of space-- and is far less susceptible to interference from outside sources, including from other wireless networks.

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