Being away from home during the holiday kind forced me to do a project I was procrastinating for very long: setup my Volla Tablet for coding sessions.

Sure the Tablet is not powerful enough to do complex work, but to write technical documentation, agentic coding and for personal projects it works really well! Here is my setup.

Development Tools

As Ubuntu Touch now has snap support, it is easy to install development tools using sudo snap install. I’m currently using:

  • astral-uv
  • aws-cli
  • hugo
  • kubectl
  • node

For IDE, I’m using seabass2, it works really well in Ubuntu Touch. I’m also using Morph Browser Qt6 Beta to access the internet, as the built in browser is outdated.

Conatiners

Ubuntu Touch has a ready only rootfs, which means that you can’t install software with apt. There’s a few ways to overcome this, the one I choose is Libertine, a chroot sandbox. With it I can install any software available for Ubuntu and use aliases to access them from the terminal. For example, I use git with this method.

Unfortunately Docker does not work in this device due to lack of kernel support. But for other devices, Docker should work fine.

AI Coding

Writing large amount of code in a Tablet, with limited resources and bad keyboard can be challenging. This is why I think this only makes sense with agentic coding. I can guide AI and run tests / small fixes, and leave the AI changing files in my Tablet while I do other stuff.

Claude Code is my choice for this kind of stuff, and it works well in Ubuntu Touch default terminal application. Claude website works in Morph, but performance is not ideal.

What I’ve done

Here is some examples of work that I’ve done in this holiday season with this setup:

  • Cleaned up unused resources in my Company AWS account
  • Released a new service in my home infra
  • Created a Vite/React SPA application for a personal project
  • Written all blog posts past December 20

Conclusion

For lightweight work, agentic coding, reviews, and following up stuff its totally possible to do work in this setup. You won’t be able to do big chunks of coding due to lack of robust IDE and the device not being powerful anyway for this. But its good to know I have this option.