Running Ubuntu Linux on Intel Baytrail Windows tablets (Linx, Lamina and others)

Good news! The developer Ron “Linuxium” Morrison is doing the heavy lifting for Intel Baytrail based devices, including the Linx/Lamina tablets and many others. He is patching the Linux kernel to work on the Intel Baytrail platform. His primary target seems to be the various stick PCs, aka compute sticks, but it works on the tablets as well.

Linuxium provides pre-built .ISO images of various Ubuntu versions (16.04LTS, 16.10, 17.04) and all different desktop editions:

I tried this on my Linx 7 (Lamina T-701) and behold - it almost works. I chose to go with the Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha 2 image, as it has the most recent Linux kernel as the baseline. I flashed the .ISO image to a USB using Etcher, connected to the tablet and booted from the USB. The operating system started flawlessly and was quite responsive. After the boot it used less than half of the RAM, so there plenty of free memory for the apps. The Lubuntu/Xubuntu versions would have even more.

Issues found

  • Touch worked, but it was 180-degrees off. This was easily worked around by rotating the display, after which the touch worked nicely.
  • For some reason I was unable to connect to my WPA secured WiFi - Ubuntu did not accept the password, which I double-checked to be correct.

Damn! This was so close to being excellent, but still these minor issues preventing it to be useful. I was hoping test how is the video performance and so forth - perhaps my Linx could have a new life as a IPTV streaming device, connected to my TV set.

Anyway, Linuxium seems to be actively working on his project, so perhaps there is hope that some day we will finally have full blown Linux running on these devices. And this brings us interesting opportunities, such as running Android-x86!

@Vulpix, have you checked this out? What do you think - is this something you could work on?

Linuxium has released new Ubuntu builds for Baytrail/Atom devices. Ubuntu and flavors: