Recently new iso’s with Plasma Mobile were released (no, don’t look at the official website, you can find it on a seemingly random blog). So how to try them out? The post just briefly mentions booting in a virtual machine. You can also find instructions how to use qemu to run Plasma Mobile there, but they describe what seems to be the old way of doing things, now obsolete.
Thanks to Nvidia’s Linux4Tegra and work of Bogdacutu and Steel01, as of today I’m running desktop Ubuntu on my Shield Tablet. And it works surprisingly well. Except some tablet-specific hardware like the modem, accelerometers and such, of course.
All it takes is to install MultiROM, patch the kernel and install the appropriate Linux4Tegra installation archive next to existing Android system and there you go:
Recently, I have been forced to finally replace my old and not-so-trusty N900 with something a little more up-to-date. I ended up with Nvidia Shield Tablet. You can get these for great price, if you are lucky, because of the global tablet recall. The old tablets can survive this procedure and seem to be working well.
UPDATE 22.1.2018
My old N900 is collecting dust in a drawer for over a year now. However, the time to resurrect this beast might come soon:
https://postmarketos.org/
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About a week ago the USB port on my N900 stopped working. Again. This is another phase of a long battle against that strange force, which keeps breaking it. I have decided to finally give up on micro USB and find a different solution.
Yesterday I had to deal with yet another issue the N900 got due to it’s aging set of applications and absence of company support. My university mail server dropped support of SSL, probably due to bugs recently found in SSLv3 protocol. Consequently, the N900’s default mail application silently ceased to check for new mail. This issue first appeared for gmail users and was solved by updating versions of Modest and tinymail in CSSU repositories. Maemo community indeed is amazing.