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Status of Linux on the Latest Tablet PCs?
AmbushBug asks: "The new Tablet PCs have been out for a while now and I was wondering if anyone has had any luck running GNU/Linux on them? I've found that its running on the Pacebooks and there seems to be some success with the Compaq TC1000. Has anyone tried running it on the Motion Computing, Toshiba, Gateway, or others?"
I've had pretty good sucess installing Debianon the Acer TravelMate C100. I've put up a page here. You'll find there a quick and dirty touch screen driver that I wrote. There's also the linux wacom page which hopefully be the final home for the touchscreen driver.
Looks to me like all the hardware is supported. This means that you don't really need a keyboard attached, but you need one if you want a decent input method.
Here's the problem. Good handwriting recognition isn't easy to code. There's some projects, like xstroke (which is what is commonly used on ipaqs and other Pocket PCs running Linux with X11, not QTopia), but that's just a single stroke recognizer. It recognizes things very similar to Palm's Graffiti.
Basically, what he was trying to say was that it works great save the textual input functionality, which is still pretty much limited to external keyboard (you could also use an on screen keyboard, but then you give up valuable screen realestate).
I'm on a TC1000 right now, and xstroke works great, better than M$'s graffiti.
I have a Frontpath Progear (now owned by Sonic Blue). It uses a 400MHz Crusoe processor. They haven't made them in the last year or two, but you can still pick them up for a few hundred dollars on Ebay (I paid a little under $400 for mine about a year ago). Many of them came preinstalled with Slackware, so getting Linux to run on them isn't an issue.