Pen-Based Linux Computing?

geekindustries asks: "Looking around auction sites I have seen a fair amount of old pen-based computers for really cheap. These machines usually run a pen-based version of DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95a. However, I feel that these machines would be much better off running Linux as opposed to a bulky Microsoft OS. Has anyone heard of pen-based Linux solutions and how to get them working on old hardware?" Larger than a PDA, but smaller than a laptop, these resemble webpads or Star Trek like PADDs. They've been around for a while, but hasn't quite broken into the consumer market, yet. Which pen-based platforms, old and new, work best with Linux?

Comments

If I put a penguin sticker on a legal pad,

[Mordant]

will -that- make you happy?

macs?

[littlerubberfeet]

There were these things for disabled mac users. They were clear plastic that went over the monitor that you could use to control the cursor. They had standard ADB input, so drivers weren't an issue, you just set the cursor speed to 'tablet' in the mouse contol panel, in other words, a one to one movement ratio. Easy to do in Linux, right?

Now, if you can find one of these, you could concievably get an adapter to hook the ADB to USB and use a G4.

Now you have a touchscreen/pen based Linux/BSD box.

Examples?

[Rick the Red]

A search of eBay for "pen-based computer" turns up nothing. Care to specify the exact make and model you're looking at? (also, how much are they going for?)

Aquapad

[NotoriousQ]

This cool little device showed a lot of promise and was not expensive. Aquapad.
I have not heard it in the news for a while though.

Need more input (with apologies to Johnny 5)

[ninewands]

If you mean something on the lines of the IBM 730T I found when I searched ebay I don't see any reason why not. I appears to run Win95 which indicates that it's at least a 386 processor. It uses a Cirrus graphics chip, so getting X to work on the thing might be dicey. My advice would be to do your own research before spending any money unless you make writing device drivers your hobby.

As for anything older than the 730T, I think your probably going to run into problems like sub-32 bit processors that will stop you.

better search examples

[joshuac]

---snip
A search of eBay [ebay.com] for "pen-based computer" [ebay.com] turns up nothing. Care to specify the exact make and model you're looking at? (also, how much are they going for?)
---snip

replace the "-" with a space (you were filtering out all hits that _included_ "based") and you get one hit. Take out the entire word "based", and it gets you 13 hits. Use look at the terminology used for these devices, and I'm sure you'll get even more.

Hate to shit on your parade....

[Wakko Warner]

...but the latest Linux kernel is gonna be just as godawful slow and bulky on an ancient pen-based tablet as an old version of DOS or Windows will be, perhaps even slower.

I've got an old 486 laptop that I got from work (it's been replaced several times over) that I thought would be a decent candidate for Linux. And I guess it was -- if you enjoyed being able to watch the screen refresh itself in X, or listening to the hard drive chatter as it slowly ran out of physical RAM and ate into swap -- and all I was doing was running X in 8 bit color with an "aterm" open!

You're going to be using a machine without a keyboard, which pretty much necessitates X windows (and a newer version at that!) and a newer kernel. If you don't want to get any use out of your tablet PC, then, by all means, use Linux! It'll run "xscreensaver" really nice, as long as you only use "life" or "rotor" mode.

- A.P.

Re:Hate to shit on your parade....

[adolf]

A friend of mine, a decade or so ago, showed me an IBM tablet running Windows. 486DX-50, which was a wicked-fast machine at the time. He talked about trying to find a bit of software called "Pen for OS/2", so he could load his OS of choice and not have to tote a keyboard wherever he went. Nice machine - I remember a good TFT display, and generally slick-looking design. It'd probably run a 2.0 kernel great, though 2.2 seems to be a bit slower on such machines. 2.4 and glibc has been almost unusable on every 486 I've tried it on. If a box like this could be located, -and- some manner of handwriting software which isn't positively maddening, it'd be a fine machine for doing light work with remote X apps.

It might also be worth investigating keeping whatever Windows preload, along with the handwriting software, installed, and use something like eXceed to display X.

On the other hand of the spectrum, a lot of slower computers just aren't up to the task of running a modern OS - at ALL.

I've got an NCR Safari 3170 running Linux. It is a 386SLC at 25MHz. It feels a bit quicker than other 386s I've used, probably due to the RAM and caching controllers being built into the CPU (!) (this thing has a higher transistor count than a 486DX).

It ran Slackware 3.0 for a few days, with 4 megs of RAM, and a 150 meg hard drive of JVC manufacture.

Even in textmode, it was swapping too much for anything but being a telnet-based terminal.

Not long after that, I rounded up a 2.1 gig drive and an extra 8 megs of RAM for the thing, which helped so much that I decided to configure X for it.

The decisively odd PhoenixView chipset is, probably obviously, unsupported so I was stuck in plain VGA mode. 640x480 has never been enough for most things X. Watching that tiny display refresh with 4-bit greyscale made me sick - it took several seconds to scroll down -one line- in a remote Netscape session. Some of that could be due to the PCMCIA NE2000 ethernet card I equipped it with, which is only good for about 75kBps inbound on the machine. The Windows 3.x preload, which had genuine PhoenixView drivers, was also pretty slow.

I can't imagine trying to do useful, modern graphical things with a machine of this calibre, unless it involves ncurses or, perhaps, aalib.

It is positively wonderful as a terminal for my headless FreeBSD machine. It uses very little power (10W or less, from all appearances), and consumes very little desk space (being from the era preceeding the arrival of 16" "notebook" displays, it is quite a bit smaller than most current portables). And it, as well as the parts laptop I used to breathe life into it, the 8 meg RAM upgrade, and hard drive, were free.

Dead reliable, too. Uptime of 33 days at this time.

I guess the point is this: Old computers can still do useful things, as long as the software being run on them is in-keeping with what was common when they were new. Old Slackware releases are nice for this, if for no reason other than that they are easy to find and that, historically, Slackware has always been fairly light-weight and efficient.

Old software like this may be full of old holes, but who cares? It sits on my desk, in my apartment, behind a locked door and a nailed-down firewall. If anyone manages to get past either of those security measures, I've got a lot more to worry about than a compromised 10-year-old laptop.

Re:Hate to shit on your parade....

[adolf]

Interesting.

I'll take another peek inside of it (or its partially-(dis)assembled brother) and see what I find.

I do doubt, somewhat, that it has much similarity to any of NCR's own designs. The ghosts of usenet past seem to indicate that the product appeared at the same time that NCR was being bought by AT&T, and that NCR was embarassed to have their name on such a finickey, expensive machine.

It's been good to me, though.

Thanks for the pointer on the meaning of PhoenixView.