> From: sajolida <sajolida@???>
>
> But then by "installing on the table" you could mean "have Tails
> installed on a SD card which is always plugged in the tablet". And that
> would work. I know people who only use Tails on a dedicated laptop like
> this.
Internal SSDs like the typical eMMC devices found in cheap x86 tablets are very nearly indistinguishable from SD cards; the major difference in functionality is that you lose the ability to yank the drive to trigger a shutdown and memory wipe, and compensating for this probably requires UI alternatives for keyboard and touchscreen. But since tablets usually have very few options for storage expansion, if someone is going to dedicate a machine to Tails, it’ll be much more convenient to put the OS on the internal drive, allowing removable storage to be used normally.
It’s good to see people in the project are already thinking about how to support touchscreen-only operation, since that’s probably the biggest obstacle. On tablets with new higher-resolution LCDs used in portrait mode, it’s probably good enough to allocate the bottom part of the screen for a keyboard, removing it from the OS’s view of the desktop. This seems to be the best mode for Windows tablets in portrait mode, too. An always-on-top keyboard window tends to work better in landscape mode as long as it’s less than half the height of the screen; it’s a disaster when it isn’t possible to move the keyboard out of the way of a text input field, and I’ve seen that happen.
>> However, there is a ticket which aims at investigating how to get
>> Tails to work on handheld devices [1][2] But the problem here is a
>> technical one: for now, Tails supports only x86 processors, and most
>> of these devices use ARM processors instead.
>
> Peter was mentioning x86 tablets. So Peter, if you want to investigate
> cheap x86 tablets and report which ones are able to run Tails or what is
> missing for that to work it would be great! As a first step towards
> having Tails on handheld devices.
Yes, I’m working on this already. I have a variety of x86 Windows tablets already (all traditional PC-style systems inside, so they all seem to run Tails normally, modulo the predictable limitations of touchscreen devices), and a Dell Venue 8 7000 on the way. The release of that one has been delayed, unfortunately. Since it comes with Android, it’ll be interesting to see whether it will still have PC-like support for external boot devices. I’ll say something here when I know.
In the long run, being able to install on ARM tablets would be nice too, but of course there’s very little commonality across ARM platforms, so supporting more than a couple of them would be a lot of work. It wouldn’t surprise me if on some of them, the internal drive is the only boot drive supported by the standard firmware.
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