By Usually we see a sexy device running WinMo or some proprietary garbage and think, “If it only had Android.” Well Archos did quite the inverse today, telling owners of the Android-based Archos 5 Internet Tablet that they could overwrite Android and load their machine with a full Linux distribution known as Angstrom Linux.
ARCHOS made this available as a simple update but warned that only experienced users should continue, calling it special developer edition firmware and suggesting it is in alpha/beta testing phase:
“If you are not a programmer/developer and would just like to try it out, understand that it will have capabilities inferior to that of the standard Archos operating system.”
So if you’ve got an ARCHOS and enjoy tinkering – or maybe you enjoy taking a fully capable device and downgrading it – move forward. This isn’t exactly like overwriting Vista with Win XP… in my mind that was a good move but cmon, who wants to delete their Droid?
[Via Reg Hardware]
The archos sucked with the gimped app market having a real version of linus will actually make it a better tablet. So IMO good move seeing as gimped android sucks :)
Hopefully this will give some modder enough leg room to finally get root on these.
Now if I could get a distro of my choice on there……
@Delphi, you can install the full Google Marketplace on the Archos Android OS.
This is not about deleting Android, it’s more about dual-booting Android together with another OS such as Angstrom, Ubuntu, Maemo, Qt or some other probably Linux based OSes. Check this thread: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=30158 it’s about installing a Boot Menu so you can pick which OS to boot and there could be any number of OS.
One alternative OS could be third party Android builds, such as some developers could make a root-capable Android build with latest Android 2.1 features, add Firefox or Chrome as the browser within Android and do any other number of tweaks. Thus Archos is making the industry’s first Android Tablet that officially supports third party OS installs, thus is totally open.
Hardware acceleration in alternative OSes is probably also going to be supported. Though is not supported yet. So there might be video decode/encode drivers to use on alternative OS installs.
interesting thanks for the info :)