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."

Comments

zaurus

[xeno]

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

Almost working.

[Mantus]

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.

Re:Why own a Tablet PC?

[uss_valiant]

I never really saw any reason to own a Tablet PC, what does it have over a labtop?

I've always dreamed of a Tablet PC and now, as I'm participating in a market analysis for Tablet PCs and WLAN, I must admit that the potential is there but the products are not ready yet.
On the hardware side, there's the darn trade-off between the portability/mobility (weight, size) and the usefulness as a digitial ink writing pad. While I highly appreciate the mobility of my 12" convertible tablet pc, I stopped quite early using it as a writing pad for non-trivial diagrams and longer texts because 12" is too small and you even lose another 2"-3" because of the casing and tool bars.
On the software side, there's a lack of applications and those applications that should be predestined for the tablet pc have serious disadvantages.
As I've pointed out in the paragraph about hardware, IMO the tablet pc isn't ready or suitable for authoring longer texts or designs. I use my convertible in the notebook mode for these tasks.
The tablet pc in slate mode is still perfect for taking notes, sketching some graphs and the like. For a student like me, this would be perfect, if a) all material would be available in a digitized form (lecture material, scripts, textbooks,...) and b) if the document viewer application had great digital ink support.

• Acrobat Reader: Most documents at our university are either .pdf or .ps. Version 6 of the Acroreader is a nightmare. The application takes so much time to start and it handles documents with images really bad, just turning to the next page can take half a minute. In acroread 5, the same documents work perfectly. And if you want to use your tablet pc features in .pdfs, you got to buy the top of the line edition of the application! And even these features are not implemented that well. The digital ink is much better in the MS products and the GUI isn't very efficient. All in all, I'm extremely disappointed with this product.
• MS PowerPoint: I'm not a MS fanboy, but I must admit that their whole MS Office line shows how applications can benefit from the tablet pc features. Only a few lectures are based on powerpoint presentations, but these are the only lectures where I can take my notes right there where I need them and it works like a dream.
• GhostView: Well, half the documents I got are postscript documents. Ghostview has no digital ink features, so I'd simply print these files with a pdf printer if the acroreader didn't suck that bad at digital ink.
• Jaws PDF Editor: Disappointed with the Adobe product, I buyed the student version of the Jaws pdf editor. But it isn't digital ink ready.
• MS OneNote: MS OneNote is the application I use to sketch some block diagrams, take meeting notes, lecture notes, etc. It's far from perfect, i.e. there's a strange bug that makes it use 100% CPU time in certain documents, but I still like it and together with MS Powerpoint, it's the only application I use in tablet pc mode.

Is it totally worthless ? I don't think so.

[juliancoccia]

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