Alternative operating systems

There are a number of alternative operating systems available for the tablets, this page aims to document them.

Debian
Debian features the most complete armel branch of any Linux distribution, as such, its large package-selection makes it a logical choice for tablet-specific optimizations.

The Debian NIT project aims to bring these optimizations (largely pushed by johnx). [|Development is ongoing], but a tarball of the last "stable" release is available on the old itT wiki page

Mamona
"Mamona is an embedded Linux distribution for armel. The main goal of the Mamona Project is to offer a completely open source alternative/experimental Platform for Maemo using only free and open source components."

Mamona is still fairly immature at this point, so not recommended for non-developers, but the project is moving forward and they're about to reach their 0.2 release (which should bring with it a much simpler installation process). There's more information available and you may be interested in getting involved on their Trac page.

Poky
Poky is a handheld-targeted distribution (the most handheld-oriented of the group), that provides an open environment, a build platform (much like the Maemo SDK and the Mamona SDK), and a finger-friendly desktop environment known as "Sato".

While still immature on the tablets, Poky is an interesting project, and their Pimlico PIM suite, in particular, may interest some users. You can get it from their website.

Ubuntu
Ubuntu has been largely recompiled for armel by the Nokia-sponsored Handhelds Mojo project. While interesting for its compilation entirely on native ARM hardware, the project is still immature and lacks even basic tablet-specific optimizations.

Ubuntu is not recommended except for those willing to put a lot of time into getting it working on their tablets (getting to a real desktop environment at this point takes a lot of work). See this PDF for more information about the how and why of the project.