Netbook

[Justin Dugger]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Sean Crago <cragos at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm looking at replacing my (potentially insecure and rarely updated)
> Xandros-powered Eee with Gigabyte's M912 (the tablet netbook) when they
> release the SSD & Linux based version, rather than switch distros on the Eee
> to something without the boot-time optimization. Anyone have considerable
> experience running Linux on a tablet, and thoughts on what's worth checking
> out when you get one? I've always been a bit of a fan of dasher and might
> play with it a little bit in the Gimp, but what else is out there? Any
> decent handwriting recognition software for note-taking et al?

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Sean Crago <cragos at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm looking at replacing my (potentially insecure and rarely updated)
> Xandros-powered Eee with Gigabyte's M912 (the tablet netbook) when they
> release the SSD & Linux based version, rather than switch distros on the Eee
> to something without the boot-time optimization. Anyone have considerable
> experience running Linux on a tablet, and thoughts on what's worth checking
> out when you get one? I've always been a bit of a fan of dasher and might
> play with it a little bit in the Gimp, but what else is out there? Any
> decent handwriting recognition software for note-taking et al?

Hi Sean,

I own a Toshiba tablet (tecra m7), and one of my activites within
Ubuntu is testing, debugging and so on for tablets.

As far as hardware, I'm not rich enough to try all the toys, so I
stick with wacom. It seems the linuxwacom drivers are supported by
wacom itself, and might be the only group to do so.  Before spending
extra money on a tablet that runs linux I'd suggest you make sure the
hardware runs well on Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte_M912 suggests that they're
shipping a range of configurations, and Ubuntu is only one of the
models.  Also, touch screens lack a good right click, and that's
important for GIMP.

As far as software goes:
* Artwork: GIMP and Inkscape both offer tablet input extensions
* Notes: Xournal and Gournal are GTK based tools attempting to emulate
notetaking.
* Text: Dasher is one option, but Cellwriter is another entrant into
the field. You train it on your handwriting and so on.  And there's
always GOK (Gnome onscreen keyboard)
* Games:  There aren't many games designed for tablets, especially
Linux ones. But a few work okay; gPlanarity is a nice, tablet friendly
game. Desmume is a Nintendo DS emulator that builds and runs on linux,
if you know of touch only games.

One thing you haven't mentioned is distributions.  Suse has a guy paid
to work in part on tablet support; the gigabyte M912M runs Ubuntu,
custom modified by Canonical ("Ubuntu Netbook Remix", available at
https://launchpad.net/netbook-remix). Debian packages all of the
software above, and the Cellwriter author  The Xournal author is an
MIT math professor and Fedora aficionado, but I'm not sure he or
anyone else within Fedora is dedicated to the tablets in general, but
if anyone does know I'd love to hear their name and what they're
working on.

Justin Dugger