The Panasonic CF-18 is a more portable version of the Toughbook series. It has a 10 1/2 inch screen, and no optical drive so it remains compact at the price of convenience. Such a configuration also reduces the power consumption. This unit, and its tablet counterpart, can swivel its screen and lock into place to become a compact tablet unit.

Panasonic considers it a fully rugged unit. A rubberized keyboard (which makes typing a chore), and rubber seals over all ports and entryways protect the components from moisture and dust. The ULV Centrino processor doesn't produce much heat, so there is no need for fans nor internal airflow. About the noisiest component is the hard disk. Though it is classified as rugged, I pulled my unit out of my bag one day to notice the left antenna guard had developed a crack. These guards on the left and right of the screen are nothing more than plastic, and probably the first thing to break under duress. I wouldn't mind so much except for the fact that it exposed the antenna's circuit board and internals.

My non-tablet CF-18 unit uses curious Fujitsu input hardware to link the touchscreen and touchpad as a single unit. This makes the touchscreen and touchpad unsupported under any current Linux Distribution (as of 6/10/2007). The good news is a kernel patch is available for the psmouse kernel driver inside the kernel source, and support for the touchscreen and touchpad will be included in the upcoming 2.6.22 kernel.

Support for the special hotkeys exist from the Panasonic Hotkey driver and utilities. Screen flipping for tablet use can be implemented with the randr utility.

Wifi, Bluetooth, and wired ethernet are all supported in modern kernels.

The hardware security chip remains untested (by me), and so does the external vga port for presentations or external monitors.

There are absolutely no issues with Linux installation for suse/redhat-based or debian-based distributions (aside from the unusable touchscreen/touchpad). Older distributions with older kernels do not detect the touchscreen at all, which makes the touchpad usable as a generic ps2 mouse.

Sam

-----edit 9/19/2010---------

www.conan.de/touchscreen/evtouch.html produced an xorg driver compatible with the cf-18 touchscreen, as well as a handy calibration gui. Since xorg server reached versions 1.6 and 1.7, this driver has failed to compile against these sources. Debian maintains patches which allow evtouch to compile and run against these newer servers. The patches are inside the xf86-input-evtouch_0.8.8-4.debian.tar.gz source package at http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/xserver-xorg-input-evtouch

You can use these patches to manually patch the source, and compile and install for most distros. Since recent xorg has moved away from the xorg.conf file and towards hal for detecting and configuring hardware, it's simple to create a specific fdi hal policy that will hold your proper calibration settings and driver selection (to not allow xorg to run the touchscreen with evdev).
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