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Linux On Your Tablet PC
tyman writes "Michael Rolig has created a Debian-based linux package for your Tablet PC. The support for various tablet features is limited by the features on the tablet Rolig owns, such as the "half-working" pen button features. One important missing feature is the screen-swivel buttons common with most tablets. However this is a good start for the development of linux for Tablet PCs."
Soon we shall challenge M$ AND Glaxo-Smith-Kline! Yes!
Meta will eat itself
elementcomputer.com sells a convertible tablet running a custom Xandros linux. The distrobution doesn't come with kernel sources, and there are many limitations on the software side. Also, touchscreen calibration as a severe pain in the ass. As an early adopter, i can deal with these limitations, but it is DEFINATELY not ready for the mainstream.
I put linux in my car. It can't steer, break, or play the radio yet, but it can make the windows go down (not up).
That site seems rather out of date. The Tc1000 isnt as standards based as the Tc1100. For kicks I tried debian and mandrake on a Tc1100 with little success, maybe we need a linux guide for newer tablets to lure in windows-only-persons.
print 'Hello world!';
http://compbrain.net
Will I be able to recompile my kernel with a stylus? ;)
The coolest voice ever.
better hope that tablet pc has accessibility features
I have a TC1000 and it crawls with WinXP. I'm going to try this and hopefully get a bit more oomph out of it. Debian's my favourite distro anyway.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
I've got linux running on my Fujitsu Stylistic 1200. It's a tablet from 97. It came with Windows 95 and has run Linux (via a loadlin) for years.
All the negative comments crack me up. It's projects like this that push invention, not just on the Linux side but also on the Microsoft side. So while the project might not be at 100% usability, it's certainly enough to get others involved, excited ect, and turn the development process from one of just development into one of hyper-development.
I'm feeling cynical about so much news of Linux stuff maybe happening. Starting. Beginning. Someone is working on X. We'll soon have Y
Even some of the better distros at hardware detection like SuSE, Mandrake and Yellowdog have community forums filled with regulars who love using the OS, yet still don't have everything working. USB2 controllers only working at 1.0 speeds, ethernet not working, many with no sound and most without accelerated graphics.
I love my linux computer, and I left Windows years ago... but when are we going to FINISH some of this stuff we started? I feel like I'm living in a world of workarounds.
I never really saw any reason to own a Tablet PC, what does it have over a labtop?
Do NOT talk about Linux on Tablet PC
While they are far from mainstream, there are many pages supporting equipment on Tablet PCs.
Other than the pen device and the attached button, it's essentially just another laptop, so the standard tricks can work.
Don't forget to check:
http://www.linuxslate.org/
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/
First is the lack of hardware support. If you happen to have a TC1000 then this guy has the drivers for you. If you happen to have an M200 (like I do), then he doesn't have the drivers for you.
Second is the lack of handwriting recognition. That's essential for using a tablet in, you know, tablet mode. Without it, even choosing to visit www.slashdot.com is a chore, and you can forget about word processing or email in the comfortable tablet form factor while riding the bus.
Third is the lack of applications. There are a few well chosen applications that support handwriting as a first class input mechanism. When scratching and scribbling on things it is comforting to have circles and lines, and even my messy handwriting, be the same as I put them in.
It would be nice to have Linux working well on my tablet, but the tablet PC is a new hardware and software platform. Microsoft doesn't have a great and polished interface for it yet, only one that is good enough. Still, every little bit of that new platform that Microsoft and others provide for Windows XP on a tablet is a little bit that Linux doesn't have yet at all.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I love my Tablet PC (a Gateway M275), and have eagerly been awaiting better Linux implementation.
Most of the time I use it as a Notebook. However, it es excellent for reading and marking up PDF files, or for doing art and drawing. Basically, the Tablet mode is a much better form factor than a Notebook for these activities.
The question should be, why NOT own a Tablet PC?
Some anti-Tablet comments remind me of those IBM-PC users back in the 80's, who used to make fun of Apple and their mice......who needs a mouse?
Sadly, I was one of those people. This time I'm trying not to be so dense.
I think, therefore I thought.
The dude from Tux Reports (www.tuxreports.com) is putting Linux distros on the Averatec C3500 and other Tablet PCs. Saw a notice the site was wiped and it's back as forums. Not many go but could become a good place again. He's posted about PCLinuxOS and Knoppix 3.7 so far.
I agree UXGA or higher resolution would be nice, but you also need to consider that tablets are usually meant to be carried around, and a large and heavy device would be less convenient. I'd love to see more resolution in a small form factor, but I'd probably prefer my M200 to a 15" UXGA tablet.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
1. Xrandr rotate extension does not work on Linux.
:P
2. Not all video adapter drivers support rotation.
3. Of some that support some do it on software and it makes screen handling extremely slow.
4. Framebuffer drivers exist only for couple adapters.
5. Vesafb works, 1280x1024 screen rotated CCW takes approx. 2-3 seconds to redraw completely on slower cards. (Like my i865G) on the super fast cards it's only like 1s.
6. With all solutions you have to restart atm the X when you want to rotate your screen.
There are exceptions to these rules but practically it goes like this. Linux has an extremely bad support for rotating X screens. I know this, bought a HIGH end tft panel with pivot and researched on the matter.
(7. The same i865G that takes 2-3 seconds for a complete screen refresh when rotated does the same instantly on Windows. The X's architecture simply isn't upto par.)
Got to suck having bought a tablet pc and finding this out..
Maybe this is misdirected, but I already have a working tablet "pc" running Linux (albeit tiny and arm-based). It's called a Zaurus. The whole SL-C series is essentially a tablet PC, with rotatable screen+changing orientation, and pen input with handwriting recognition and onscreen kb + pointer functions. It works rather well using the stock Sharp linux distro, and OpenZaurus is really quite slick for this tablet-type device.
Looking at this project, some areas that are incomplete include the swivel sensor and other doodads that have already been tackled by OZ. Seems like it would make sense to build on the OpenZaurus codebase, rather than start from scratch, especially for Debian.
-J
I think not...(*poof*)
Does anyone know of work towards a totally stylus based GUI? Right now everything in the GUI world seems based around pointing and clicking. However, gestures seem a natural for a transfer to a pen-based GUI.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I have one of these tablets (TC1000) running gentoo. Most of the hardware works but not 100%. For instance, the pen works but is really choppy and there is no configuration program so you have to spend about 1/2 an hour starting then exiting X and changing the xorg.conf device settings by hand. If you use GDM the pen doesn't work at all. There is also no way to emulate a third button with the pen since you have to press the #2 button and tap the screen (which is also how it works in windows). the .xmodmaprc on this site might work except gnome just says it will ignore it. Ive yet to get rotate to work, perhaps if i used the "nv" rather than "nvidia" driver. The point is, the support for the device is in such a state that linux can be used as the primary OS but not in a corporate enviornment.
I've been discussing all sorts of linux on tablet issues on my site:
http://groundstate.ca/tablet
Includes available software, wireless roaming, Mandrakelinux, and specifically, the TC1000 and TC1100.
grandparent is "interesting" ?
parent is "troll" ?
what the fuck are you guys taking? either cut the dosage, or increase it.
I've had one dual-booting for a couple of years now. In WinXp, we demo our products. Under an updated RH8, it's a most excellent wardriving system. I can run 2 802.11 cards (PCMCIA and CF), and maybe a GPS with a USB-serial dongle. Folded down, it's a lot more convenient to carry than an open laptop. And it's quite useable with the pen a virtual keyboard in this configuration.
If my Zaurus 5600 had more I/O capability, it would be almost as good...
I wouldn't want to use one everyday, but it's a terrific admin device.
Linux on Tablet PCs?! Nice!
Next step: Any Tablet PC owner at all (if any exist)
I started last year (pardon: two years ago) a little project about installing (SuSE) Linux on the above Tablet PC.
If you like to contribute, feel free:
http://www.neurath.org
Frank
i have an acer TM c100. 256mb ram, 800mhz processor, 40gb hard drive, full size keyboard, 1024x768 tft screen and ONLY 1.4kg. for £850 + VAT last year.
hardware it has PXE boot (so you can get it started without needing to go through USB floppy or USB cd-rom) wireless and 10/100 hardwire, and firewire and usb-2, i810 ac97 sound, IR port, a tracker-pad (with all 6 buttons recognised by linux) and the full screen is ESD-touch-sensitive.
all other laptops you are bloody stupid to have bought, if you ask me: buy one of these and strap some bricks on the back if it makes you feel any better.
me? i would be better off if i stuck with a 2.4 kernel or a debian/stable system because there are binary drivers available for the Wacom touchscreen chipset.
the incompatibility between the drivers and X is due to the drivers (available on sf.net) being compiled for only 19200 and 38400 baud, but the wacom device's baud rate defaults to 115200.
so i had to patch and recompile the X driver to cope with 115200 baud. i only managed this once - and then upgraded and lost it!
the only other thing is that ACPI is not properly recognised (every single linux kernel presently available goes "invalid ACPI checksum, squawk!")
as a consequence of this, you must select which of the networking devices you wish to see on your PCI bus at boot time - the RTL 8139, or the extra Texas Instruments 3.3V PCMCIA slot with a built-in orinico-compatible 802.11b wireless device.
if you press the "flip" button, forget it - reboot time to get networking back.
what else... oh yes. after a year of virtually constant use, i've cracked the screen "side" catches (but they still work) the "middle" catch broke last week (but the one on the other side for locking the screen into tablet mode is still there) i've worn writing off of S, C and the left shift and ctrl, scored _lines_ in the left shift key with my nails, but other than that, it's still serviceable, and i love it.
oh. and the hard drive has about one head-crash per three months and wipes bits of my ext3 partitions out...
Evernote http://evernote.com/ has a nice note taking app in beta (free download) that they say will be ported to Linux.
. html
It does handwriting recognition and they also say they're aiming for audio notes along the lines of OneNote. The handwriting recognition is working very well for me.
My main interest in Tablet PC's is note taking. Appropriate hardware (pen input) running Linux plus Evernote with good audio notes would do the trick for me. Something like the Pepper Pad 2 http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7558010259
The Evernote beta is Windows only for now and free. There's a good forum going on their site about the beta, too.
Honestly, though, I'd _really_ like appropriate hardware running OS X plus Evernote....
if you can afford a tablet pc, when xp tablet edition is pretty awesome and well-tested and integrated with other existing microsoft products?
here's the thing about open source - as soon as it becomes big, and still rule the world.
sure, linux and mozilla and everything else open-source is pretty cool, but how hard would it be for microsoft to emulate the best of open source's features and integrate it with every other microsoft product? not very hard, especially when you have billions of dollars and some of the world's best programmers that .
unless there's something intrinsically better about open-source products, the movement will die as soon as people realize they're getting paid nothing and will always be paid nothing to create an inferior product.
but don't worry, microsoft's monopoly power is waning so we really have nothing to worry about. in five years, they'll be a good corporate citizen and everyone will be happy. trust me. ^_-
[note: i own an hp tablet pc tc1100 and it's 100x better than any laptop out there)
Open source allows a freedom that makes them intrinsically better indeede and more people are finally getting this
A lot of open source developers get paid and next to that there's more than direct financial pay.
Read up on http://steltenpower.com/OS4entrepreneurs.pdf
Mor
Because, as we all know, the GUI maketh the OS. Or not.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I bet in 6 months the car will either fly or run 10 million kilometers with 1 gallon of gas.
The words "massive troll" come to mind here.
I suggest you look at the reality rather than the emotional response and realize that Open Source continues to grow and improve.
For example, note the following:
"Bloor Research had both operating systems (Linux and NT) running on relatively old Pentium machines. In the space of one year, Linux crashed once because of a hardware fault (disk problems), which took 4 hours to fix, giving it a measured availability of 99.95 percent. Windows NT crashed 68 times, caused by hardware problems (disk), memory (26 times), file management (8 times), and a number of odd problems (33 times). All this took 65 hours to fix"
Maybe Microsoft should put those "best programmers in the world" to work on making a stable operating system.
-Jay
I have a Toshiba m200 Tablet Pc. I was able to get with help from members of a local linux group to have most things working. But sadly the most important bit, the Pen Input was not working.
Why do I want to run Linux on a tablet PC. It all comes down to being able to do what I want to do with my machine not being able to do what Microsoft wants me to do with it...
name two
(that someone knowlegeable enough to run linux isn't able to do. not my mother)
I'm feeling cynical about so much news of Linux stuff maybe happening. Starting. Beginning. Someone is working on X. We'll soon have Y
Well, if Y differs from X i think its great(a little innovation have never hurt anybody). But, in about 8/10 cases it doesn't. It's most often X with a different UI, adding to the already bloated package foundries of our distro's of choice.
Even some of the better distros at hardware detection like SuSE, Mandrake and Yellowdog have community forums filled with regulars who love using the OS, yet still don't have everything working. USB2 controllers only working at 1.0 speeds, ethernet not working, many with no sound and most without accelerated graphics.
Define regulars? I could understand your statement if you said that the PnP systems didn't detect everything automatically. But I have a hard time believing that things like Ethernet cards and USB2, if the hardware is supported by Linux, will cause any problems to a regular user. And a even harder time imagining the support-forum that wouldn't be able to assist with such trivial issues.
Also, it doesn't seem to me that people have that many problems with sound any more. I can't imagine any 2.6 distribution, which doesn't have compiled sound support as a module. So in a "worst case scenario" where sound isn't automatically installed you wouldn't even have to recompile your kernel(only the alsa driver). And about the hardware accelerated graphics, if you choose a graphics card from a vendor supporting Linux(like nvidia) then enabling both hardware acceleration is pretty easy(i got both 2D and 3D acceleration working with Xorg in a matter of minutes).
Putting Linux on your tablet is a bit like putting Linux on your powerbook....or putting Linux on your iPaq
Right. It's also a lot like putting it on your x86 laptop. Or your XBox, HDTV, DVR, PS2, or any of the other thousands of products that linux runs on. It's probably the most flexible general purpose OS ever. Which means folks inclined to tinker can put it wherever the hell they feel like. Get over it.
(For the record, I do own an iPaq, and it does run Linux. I'm quite pleased with it.)
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
My university just began a Tablet PC program at the beginning of this academic year and while I admit that I was a bit skeptical at first, I've become a believer in the power of Tablet PCs. The students and faculty have been issued the M275 Gateway Tablets and while it may not be the best of the best in terms of hardware, I still wouldn't trade it for a top of the line laptop.
So what's so great about these Tablet PCs? Portability comes to mind right away. Sure, the wireless internet access is great, but this thing's also incredibly lightweight compared to all the books I used to carry around, which leads me to another point -- consolidation. Despite having only started this Tablet PC program this past fall, several of my books for my classes were either online or in an electronic format of some kind. My chemistry lab manual was in PDF form and (unfortunately at times) specifically prohibited printing so as to comply with the goal of making our school a paperless campus. Every single professor I had this past semester told my classmates and me to leave our books at home because we wouldn't need them. All of my assignments were submitted electronically and returned electronically. Students and professors alike could search for information in class in real time. Want to find the electronegativity of Francium? Go Google it!
The thing for me which sets the Tablet head and shoulders above just a plain old laptop, though, is the writing feature. I take all of my notes on my Tablet (using Microsoft OneNote). I did all of my calculations for Chemistry, Economics, and Math in OneNote as well. I printed professor's powerpoint lecture notes to the Windows Journal and wrote right onto the PowerPoint presentations. My Economics professor created lecture note templates for each chapter and allowed us to fill them in as he taught. In just one semester, notebooks and paper essentially became obsolete, and instead of dragging 3 several hundred page books, 3 notebooks, and 3 folders to class, I only took my Tablet, stylus, and maybe a calculator (though the Tablet even has that, and I even have a TI-89 emulator on my Tablet). The Tablet made my schoolwork so much more consolidated.
The one thing I do long for, however, is to run GNU/Linux on my Tablet. We're allowed to install pretty much whatever we want to as far as software on our machines, and I looked for a distro that would match XP Tablet Edition, but I couldn't find anything that came close. I dislike Microsoft just as much as the next guy (or gal), but I have to admit that when it comes to Tablet PCs, the free software camp is really trailing behind. I considered Xandros and also Lycoris' Tablet PC distro, but they're in their infancy at best. I'd miss being able to write in red ink all over a word processing document, writing notes and then having the program convert them into typed text, and the amazing handwriting recognition (especially with XP Tablet Edition 2005). I long for free software to catch up, and as a Computer Science major I hope that perhaps soon I may be able to begin contributing toward that goal, but for now Microsoft has the power and unfortunately that's the way things are. I really welcome this article's news of developers taking an interest in the Tablet PC and sincerely hope it's just the tip of the iceberg with respect to free software growing to serve the Tablet PC market.
echo $SIG
I've had my Toshiba Portege 3500 running Gentoo for a long time now. As far as I know everything is supported except for IR and some software configuration (sleep modes, etc). The digitizer works wonderfully with the beta drivers. Support may have moved into the stable driver by now. For help setting it up, I found this page: http://rekl.no-ip.org/3500/ which covers about everything. The only problem I had was that PCMCIA CDROM support is sketchy. For installation I found that Mandrake 9 (or was it 10 beta) worked but I couldn't find any other distro that detected the drive. At one point I may have had it working in Gentoo but I don't recall. There's two reasons I still have Windows on the tablet as well... first, the Toshiba BIOS is very difficult to access and the Windows tools to change bios settings are much easier. Second, I just haven't found any good inking programs for linux. I bought this for school and use ink all the time in taking class notes, it's very useful. The digitizer works great for gimp (pressure sensitivity works very well) but that's about it. Any ideas for linux inking programs that would work well for taking and organizing notes?
Gee, Bill, is this how bad your grammar is when Melinda isn't helping you out with your emails?
In the years I've spent working with linux systems, I've come to the conclusion that only half of the problem is insufficient development on the linux side of things.
More often, I've found myself upset that the hardware manufacturers fail to support linux, either by implementing MS-specific functions, using MS-specific standards, or by not open-sourcing drivers.
In this regard, often the linux developers are more than happy to implement hardware drivers or interfaces, and are very successful at what they do, but spend a great deal of time working around all of the obstacles that the hardware developers put up for them.
Wireless support is a good example of this. If you have a card that uses open-sourced drivers, wireless support is very good in linux. If you don't, however, you're screwed. You're not screwed because there aren't people working on wireless support on the linux side, but because the hardware developers implement their systems using a Windows specific driver API (ndis), and don't provide linux drivers or open source their code. So people have to start whole projects (e.g., ndiswrapper) just to implement a linux wrapper to a Windows API.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems with linux usability, and I agree that some of this has to do with linux developers. However, I've come to the conclusion that the linux developers themselves are only a part of the problem--the other part of the problem is that they are disadvantaged by hardware manufacturers to begin with. Not only do they have to catch up with MS and Apple in terms of usability (although less and less so now), they have to do so while simultaneously not having much of the support of hardware manufacturers.
The problem with tablet PCs is that there are tons of manufacturers out there (mostly in Asia) and it is very hard to find hardware support.
;)
A good example is my BluePAD Tablet PC. It totally lacks linux support and I was unable to find any info whatsoever about the touchpad interface.
After playing with it for a while, I finally managed to do something useful with it and posted a small tarball on my site that would get it to boot into X:
http://julian.coccia.com/article-71.html
Someone said it is stupid to install linux on a Tablet PC that already comes with an OS preinstalled. Well, I strongly disagree here.
My Tablet PC came with CE.NET preinstalled. Everything worked, yes, but I couldn't install any software on it unless I wanted to write it myself which required me to sign up to M$ and get a demo copy of their CE.NET compiler (or whatever they call it). Therefore, the Tablet PC as it was as USELESS for me.
Now I can boot into X and do what I wanted to do with it
More info on how I installed linux on it: http://julian.coccia.com/article-40.html
I have one of these as well, and would like to add a blurb about pdaXrom, which is an alternate ROM that uses X instead of a modified Qtopia.
While it currently doesn't do anything for handwriting recognition (why bother with a full and excellent keyboard), and the UI works pretty well for touch input. Not only that, while your buddies are using slimmed-down feature-light software, you'll have a full word processor (abiword), spreadsheet (gnumeric), email program (pick one), browser (firefox, konqueror), graphics program (gimp), compiler (native gcc!), editor (vim, etc.), games (quake, doom, nethack, angband, dosbox, frozen bubble, scummvm, snes9x, etc.), and the list goes on.
While these are expensive, i can't imagine using anything else... a full suite of software in my pocket, with GPRS for internet-anywhere, is very, very useful.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Clinton was impeached for perjury, not for lying per se. Typical liberal spin.
Typically conservative ignorance. The federal perjury statute defines the felony as lying about a "material point" which is elsewhere defined as a point having an impact on the matter under scrutiny in the case. Considering that the question of whether Clinton got a BJ had absolutely nothing to do with any of the charges he was discussing with that grand jury that day, it was as immaterial as a question about what he had for breakfast that morning. It was never even close to questionable whether that was a chargeable offense.
Clinton was impeached for an act that was unquestionably not a crime, and any trial lawyer will tell you the same.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
I have a tablet PC, and set up dualboot. I agree that it is like installing Linux on a Powerbook. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition is the closest thing to usable for tablet PCs, and all useful tablet applications are written for it. There is absolutely no contest when compared to Linux. However, I can use Linux for some things that Windows can't do, so I convert to laptop mode and use it as a normal Linux laptop.
If you plan to use Linux exclusively on a Tablet PC, you are wasting a lot of money.
To check out the opie project, it runs neatly on Tablet based computers and is made for things like that (PDAs tablets...)
The Siemens simpad can run linux, thanks to open simpad. I run Qtopia on mine, but it can also run Opie and X11 if you want that. This screen is an actual touchscreen, so I don't even need a stylus, I can use my finger.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
I have one of these in my desk somewhere. Vendor claimed to have Linux support but I never got support flashing it or installing Midori Linux or whatever they wanted.
Rainy day project I guess. Maybe this will help.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Huh?
Despite the admonition to not quarrel with a fool (folks might not be able to tell who's who), I'll bite.
why would you want to run linux when xp tablet edition is pretty awesome and well-tested and integrated with other existing microsoft products?
First, I think your unsupported claims of XP's "awesome" and "well-tested" nature are quite amusing. I'll leave "awesome" alone because of its absolutely subjective nature, but I'll still note that I disagree, and feel instead that it "sucks." About "well-tested" though...how many remote root exploits were discovered for XP within the first quarter-year of its release?
here's the thing about open source - as soon as it becomes big, microsoft will adapt and still rule the world.
I must have missed the memo detailing that Microsoft currently rules the world. However, much more pertinent in my opinion is the question of their adaptation. Because clearly, open source has become big. One system runs the majority of the Internet. It's not Windows. As for the adaptation issue, I'm interested to hear what you think they might do. Because clearly, they haven't got any ideas yet...flailing about wildly and talking about how OSS is "cancer" doesn't count, and neither do advertisements about how 7-11 figured out that Windows on x86 was cheaper than Linux on mainframes. BTW, in case anyone was wondering, it is also more expensive to buy a Ferrari to go through the McDonald's drive-through than it is to take a cab to the nicest eatery in town.
how hard would it be for microsoft to emulate the best of open source's features and integrate it with every other microsoft product? not very hard, especially when you have billions of dollars and some of the world's best programmers that actually get paid for coding.
First, Microsoft does not have nearly as many programmers on its payroll as there are OSS programmers working on Linux-centric projects. Second, they don't spend nearly as much money paying their coders as the rest of the corporate world spends combined on Linux-centric development. So, instead of your "not very hard" analysis, I'd say "pretty much fucking impossible." And finally, if this isn't very hard, then why has the pace of OSS development clearly been outstripping what MS is capable of over the last decade or so? I mean, in 1995 the comparison between Linux and Windows was truly laughable. I started with Linux in 1998, and it wasn't even close to viable. Now, I find Linux much more usable and capable than Windows, to the point where I have one Windows installation left; a 10% chunk of my laptop harddrive, which booted less than 5 times in 2004. We were playing catchup for a while. Those days are past. We have not seen this alleged "adaptation." And we won't.
the movement will die as soon as people realize they're getting paid nothing and will always be paid nothing to create an inferior product.
Sorry, but this "movement" has been around pretty much exactly as long as computers have. In fact, Microsoft's model is much younger. Likewise, I don't think it's OSS whose model is passing into the crucible; it's Microsofts. We are about to find out whether proprietary software can really work. I think the answer is "no."
Also, you completely ignore the fact that many large companies are paying OSS developers.
but don't worry, microsoft's monopoly power is waning so we really have nothing to worry about.
Oh, never mind. I'm not sure why I replied. This poster was clearly simply under the influence of LSD.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Yes the funny thing is, OSS bascially roots down to the origins of computers, Microsofts business model roots down into the late 70s. In the early days programs were seen as extended mathematics and basically shared without a single thought. Much of the unix development process happened that way, due to a constant exchange between AT&T and Berkeley. The fiasco started as people saw, that they could earn money by not sharing and selling and, then the beancounters and lawyers jumped onto the ship and started suing. Sort of like the wild west, where many people lived quite happy until the mine mine criers came and with it the crime, the laywers and all the bad things we know about the so called wild west (also the gold rush did its thing)
They have very good people, the problem with Microsoft I see is, that the fish starts to stink at the top. Microsoft never had a mentality of quality on the management side, they have this we want it all mentality, but as soon as they bascially dominate a market they move like insects to the next one to take over. See the Microsoft management like the kid in the sandbox which basically grabs at the toys of the other children and cries mine mine mine. So how does the qualiy play into the game. They keep their number of employees at exactly the level they are used to to perform this tactic. As soon as they have significant market share, the development bascially goes on a hiatus because the core people are moved to the next we will takeover project. (The perfect example for this is IE and a bunch of other things) while trying to keep up the good ole monopoly by breaking and taking over standards. So in the end, you get quality as long as there is competition and as soon as there is none, forget it.
To me the whole thing is more like a Pinky and Brain episode, to sad that this is not a cartoon. Replace Pinky and Brain with Bill and Steve and you would even have a better cartoon.
I don't have one, you insensitive clod!
So, by telling me MY tablet PC, I am to assume that you are sending me one. And Linux will be on it.
Thanks!
http://www.rootsmart.com/
Here are a few corrections:
6)I can run web/ftp/mail servers. If you want to do this with Windows, you'll need to either buy the expensive MS offerings, or go get Apache and thank the same geeks you are dissing.
Windows XP Pro does come with a web server, it's just not installed by default.
7)I can remotely access both Windows Terminal Services and VNC, or run a VNC server. This will require 3rd party software in windows.
Windows XP (Home and Pro) comes with a Terminal Services client out of the box. It's called Remote Desktop Connection (Yes it really does work with Terminal Services too). I can easily install free VNC if I need it. VNC is also 3rd party software on Linux.
8)I can play DVDs. Again, 3rd party software does this for windows.
Windows Media Player can play DVDs I can even navigate the menus.
9)I can burn CDs. Same story.
Windows XP has built-in CD burning but I personally prefer Nero.
10)I can take a blank hard drive, write DOS partitions to it, and format it for FAT32, in any size, in under 1 minute. Windows XP will only create up to a 32GB partition, and takes over an hour to accomplish it.
I agree with the FAT32 32MB limitation but there is a quick format option in Windows XP that will do the job in seconds. It's even available during the Windows installation. And why would you need 250GB FAT32 partitions? It's a lousy file system anyway.
How many hard drive cables have you gone through?
In Hong Kong, not much people buy Tablet PC to use. Most of them choose Notebook or PDA, they feel Tablet PC so expensive and duplicate function with Notebook.
We were doing this at Transmeta five years ago!
:)
One of the team members developing Linux code for the prototype web-pads (as we called them) was...Linus!
Talk about a home-field advantage.
Also note that he was impeached but not convicted.
I don't understand where you make this distinction - You're drawing a line between OS'es and hardware based on what? Capabilities? Fortunately (for those interested in putting alternative software on their mobile devices) the line between desktop and handheld is becoming increasingly thinner...
"In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates?"
I currently have a Toshiba Portege M200 running Linux. When I do use it folded back as a tablet, it's when I'm just reading something. The handwriting recognition (xstroke) is just too frustrating to use for much text so I fold it back around to laptop style if I need to type. The one problem with reading on my m200 is that the machine is too heavy and awkward at 2kg.
The flybook is about half that at 1.1kg. The problem currently is no one has gotten the touchscreen to work in linux. (see handtops discussions). I'm waiting to see before I buy it.
My company has Fujitsu Stylus 1400 and LP-600 tablets running Gentoo Linux. We have all to the pen working perfectly and we have had very little problems with Linux on them. The only problems we do have is users dropping them. We have also successfully tested wireless on the lp-600 and on the latest Fujitsu tablet.