Please can someone 'Riddle' me this ------

[jeremy.airey]

Hi Chaps

Little background - recently my Linux (easy peasy) based netbook went squirly on me so I took the nuclear approach and reloaded the laresest distro of the easy-peasy o/s and problems solved.
Now what I'm wondering is why I can't just load a generic version the latest android (2.3 gingerbread?) operating system afterall it's only an operating system and I believe that android relates to linux rather than a windows style system so a 'distro' should be available.
Is there a download for an android 2.xxxx system out there I can try? It doesn't need to be an update and I'd be happy just to try and load it as is.
If this isn't possible can someone explain why not in simple terms - is it some strange 'apple' style restrictive thing going on here, 'I-pad,touch,phone' users willl know what I mean, and I'd hope Android was better than that.
At present I'm running Tipsters great epad extreme but as good as this is the limitations especially around anything "Adobe" (pdf,flash) are a tad annoying.
BTW I.ve asked this before but what is the tie up between the o/s version and the 'WMT' number ?

Please, please could somebody take this on as I really would like to know.
many thanks and regards
Jeremy

 

[Tillan]

The issue with tablets and OS's is that tablets are usually based on an ARM (or similar) CPU. This means that only an OS that is built to run on an ARM CPU will be able to work on the tablet.
Android is one OS that will, iOS, symbian (Nokias OS) and Maemo are others. You cant take an operating system that is built to work on x86 cpus (intel/amd) and put it on an ARM cpu because the OS simply doesn't know how to give the CPU instructions, and vica versa. This means while it is theoretically possible to load a normal linux OS onto a tablet, you will have to get one that is built for the CPU type you have.

This brings us to the second issue. The number of people who want to hack and put a different OS on their tablets is very small. Most people are happy with what they pay for, they dont expect PC functionality on a tablet, so they dont try to get it. This means the hardware manufacturers can do some things to make the tablet better for those people, like only allowing one OS to be booted. By doing this the hardware manufacturers can make android load faster, because the hardware doesnt have to search for an OS like a PC does.

All this means that even though the android OS is open source, and is available to download and use, it isnt easy.