[dundee] Tablet PC's

[Robert McWilliam]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:41:01AM +0000, Robert Ladyman wrote:
> Anyone using Linux successfully on a (full-size ~ A4) tablet PC, and if so, 
> what distro and what device?
> 

I'm using a thinkpad X61T with Ubuntu now. I've previously used an HP
and a Fujitsu tablet with Ubuntu. With 8.10 I had to set up the tablet
in the xorg.conf manually but it works fine now that I have. Previous
versions worked out of the box (except the non-pen touch in the X61)
but the change to having a minimal xorg.conf and everything being
autodetected lost the support for serial tablets (until recently
pretty much all tablet PCs were using serial internally - I don't know
if it's changed now) USB ones still work out of the box I think. 

I haven't gotten screen rotation to work yet but I have heard that
other people have. The X61 has a 4:3 screen so things don't change
much rotating it so I've never bothered to look into getting it to
work properly. 

There are some issues if you're planning on getting one without a
keyboard (or using one with a keyboard in tablet mode). I haven't
found any handwriting recognition software for linux that's
particularly good so you're left with onscreen keyboard (onboard is
fucntional and can be resized but isn't particularly attractive) or
using one of the primitive ones. Possibly a bigger problem is password
entry: getting an onscreen keyboard for screensaver unlock and GDM has
so far been beyond me. I haven't tried all that hard as I've got a
fingerprint reader on this tablet. I have seen docs for getting onboard
to run when GDM comes up but I haven't seen anything for the
screensaver unlock prompt. It might be somewhere on the internet
though...

If you have a specific model that you're thinking of getting then
google can usually come up someone else who's already tried it unless
it's very new. 

     Robert

________________________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam            rmcw at allmail.net             www.ormiret.com

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its
continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the
computer hardware industry.
   	--  Henry Petroski