I’ve the opportunity to test out a decTOP computer at my workplace today. decTOP was originally produced as a low-cost computer to allow people from emerging countries to access the internet.
Originally, decTOP (formerly PIC) was shipped with Microsoft Windows CE and Internet Explorer 6.0, but recent release changes the BIOS behavior of decTOP, that’s allow it to boot from USB devices (flash drive and external DVD-drive).
This has led me to do few experiments with the decTOP computer. I’ve tried installing it with Ubuntu, then Windows XP, and finally Android.
and I found Android runs nicely on the decTOP without any modifications. The downside is, that currently only Android 1.6 is available for installing on x86 machine.
What happened to Ubuntu?
Apparently I ran into some difficulties in installing Ubuntu on decTOP. With LiveCD image, it is obvious that the 128MB SODIMM ram is not enough to load the desktop interface, let alone installing it. I tried the server edition and it succeeds, but the point is to run a usable Linux desktop out from decTOP machine, and I think Android do shine in this area.
Android drawback?
One drawback though, Android won’t let you save the downloaded *.apk on the remaining harddisk space, you got to use USB stick for that.