I am looking at this piece of hardware and want to understand if I could run Debian on it:
http://www.dell.com/us/p/dell-venue-...ll-venue-8-pro
according to the website, the dell Venue 8 Pro (2013), has an Atom Z3740D as its processor (1.8GHz Quad-Core) - which if it could run Linux would be way better than any laptop in that range, in my own opinion. I am also worried about the stylus (and its digitizer) and getting it to work - but I think I could probably write whatever X11 would need to pull the information.

Will this work? Atom's are x86's right?

Yes atom is just a fancy name for cheap x86's.

I run a Fedora server on an Acer revo 1600 and xbmc-live on a revo 3610.

Nice! Any idea what I have to do to load the OS the first time? (to install and whatnot?)

Not sure I should've read more carefully and realized you were asking about a tablet.

Some windows-8 based laptops come pre installed with some efi-bios secureboot which makes it tough to boot an alternate os. I have no experience with that.

fyi: zotac sells inexpensive atom/ion based boards that can boot any os (except for mac os x)


Someone on the comments here is planning on doing the same thing. Sorry no instruction:
http://liliputing.com/2013/10/dell-v...month-300.html

As always, some other report of working unit in linux would help.

I'd look at some of the distro's that claim to have more tablet support. Even big name distro's have an option to add in tablet support on install.

If this has a usb you may be in luck more than trying to load it to hard drive. I'd see how well you get it working on a usb flash drive maybe a sd card if it can boot from them.

In this case it may be a bit better Atom. Yes, they are basically low power x64 I think however the default OS is only 32 bit so easy enough to use a 32 bit os.

Looks like you can run a virtual machine on it maybe.