[Liverpool] Linux on ARM

[Sebastian]

Just a bit of an open topic - more for my general knowledge, if not for 
anything else :-)

I was thinking about the fact that the market is being taken over by 
these iPad clones (ish) - and all of the ones I've seen seem to be based 
on some flavour of ARM processor. I was wondering if this would mean a 
new impetus for the various ARM Linux distributions out there. I'm aware 
that there has been continuous effort in this direction over the years - 
but the most significant ARM devices available for (sort of) mass 
consumption have been some hackable routers, and the SheevaPlug device. 
I'm not really aware about other stuff with ARM inside that you could 
just buy and install Linux on.

Would people here think that we will see new effort directed towards 
hacking all these cheap(ish) ARM tablets and installing some proper 
Linux on them. I don't know much about hardware particularities for 
these devices - specially things like BIOS (or whatever ARM world tends 
to call it) - which might make it difficult or impossible to hack around 
on these. Or if this might mean that a generic ARM distribution couldn't 
pull it off - as each device might have esoteric ways of beeing 
rooted/jail-broken - which would fragment too much the development effort.

In case I wasn't clear enough in my ramble :-) : are we going to see a 
situation, like in the x86 world, where one can just download an ARM 
distribution, pick up any ARM tablet, install it and get on with things 
- kind of some sort of universal compatibility? Again, I don't enough 
about hardware aspects of the ARM world - so I would like to know if I'm 
imagining the impossible.

Any comments welcome,

Sebastian