Re: [Tails-ux] Internal HD install

Peter N. Glaskowsky:
>> 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.

Did you investigate whether GNOME is already working on supporting
touchscreen and touchscreen keyboard?

> 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.

I could agree with that. The thing is that we surely don't want to
remove for *any* device the software protection that we have. So maybe
we'd have to add exceptions for tablets.

When you say that they have very few options for storage expansion, how
often do they have a SD card slot for example?

> 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.

I'm pretty sure that we won't work on a custom solution for that in
Tails, but rather depend on upstream projects to support those better
(namely GNOME, and to some extend Debian). But I personally have no idea
whether they are working on this already (I guess they are somehow).

>> 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)

Do you mean that you already started Tails on one of those tablets?
which brands and models?

> 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.

Cool.

--
sajolida