And now for some hardware (Onda v975w)

Prodded by Adam Williamson's fedlet work, and by my inability to getting an Android phone to display anything, I bought an x86 tablet.

At first, I was more interested in buying a brand-name one, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro Adam has, or the Lenovo Miix 2 that Benjamin Tissoires doesn't seem to get enough time to hack on. But all those tablets are around 300€ at most retailers around, and have a smaller 7 or 8-inch screen.

So I bought a "not exported out of China" tablet, the 10" Onda v975w. The prospect of getting a no-name tablet scared me a little. Would it be as "good" (read bad) as a PadMini or an Action Pad?

Vrrrroooom.

Well, the hardware's pretty decent, and feels rather solid. There's a small amount of light leakage on the side of the touchscreen, but not something too noticeable. I wish it had a button on the bezel to mimick the Windows button on some other tablets, but the edge gestures should replace it nicely.

The screen is pretty gorgeous and its high DPI triggers the eponymous mode in GNOME.

With help of various folks (Larry Finger, and the aforementioned Benjamin and Adam), I got the tablet to a state where I could use it to replace my force-obsoleted iPad 1 to read comic books.

I've put up a wiki page with the status of hardware/kernel support. It's doesn't contain all my notes just yet (sound is working, touchscreen will work very very soon, and various "basic" features are being worked on).

I'll be putting up the fixed-up Wi-Fi driver and more instructions about installation on the Wiki page.

And if you want to make the jump, the tablets are available at $150 plus postage from Aliexpress.

Update: On Google+ and in comments of this blog, it was pointed out that the seller on Aliexpress was trying to scam people. All my apologies, I just selected the cheapest from this website. I personally bought it on Amazon.fr using NewTec24 FR as the vendor.