I know these just came out but I was wondering if anyone had tried to install ubuntu on the Dell Venue pro 8 or 11. You can see the specs at dells website here:Most other tablets seem to run 'arm' which from everything I've read is a pain however these come with full blown windows 8.1 and an unlocked boot loader. They have an SD card slot and a micro USB (which I could boot a usb from with an adapter).
Dell Venue 8 Pro Manual
The only thing I'm worried about is if I come up against some kind of weird driver or hardware issue. I've googled 'linux on dell venue 8 pro' but have just found a bunch of reviews. I don't want to buy it unless I can get rid of windows and run ubuntu. I just bought one of these and tried booting Fedora on it. Written up.Secure Boot is enabled out of the box but is easy to disable in the firmware.
You access the firmware by holding the volume down button for a couple of seconds right after powering on. The tricky thing about Bay Trail systems is that they have 32-bit UEFI firmwares, whereas up until now, just about every other UEFI system has been 64-bit UEFI, and that's what distros have focused on supporting. You need an image with a working 32-bit UEFI boot chain to get anywhere on one of these things. I was able to build such a Fedora image and get the system booted, but wasn't able to get to a functioning X or console due to what look like various kernel issues, with 3.12 and 3.13 kernels. Haven't tried any Ubuntu images yet, but I imagine Ubuntu would behave fairly similarly.edit: there's no 'legacy boot' (CSM).
Venue 8 Pro Linux
You can only boot the things from the internal storage or a USB stick, via native 32-bit UEFI. Can't boot in 'legacy mode', 'BIOS mode', whatever you want to call it, and can't boot from a micro SD card either (seems like). If you're going to buy one of these to fiddle with you're going to want a USB OTG adapter and a USB hub.
Linux Dell Venue 8 Pro
Just to clarify, are you talking the Android-based Dell Venue 7/8? I don't see why it would have Windows-8 style secure-boot, and when I chatted with Dell chat they mentioned it does support root.Just curious why Dell Venues aren't getting much attention/work porting as Nexus7, it seems to be very similar specs, about half the price. Is this secure-boot the Achilles' heel keeping this thing on AndroidOS (and outdated version, at that)?Please read the original post he did say Pro and even gave a link showing Windows 8.1 and Bay-Trail quad-core Intel Atom CPU.I'd be interested if you could get Ubuntu to work on this.