Hey guys.

I was wondering what your experiences are like for linux on tablet PC (compared to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition especially). I bought it as a tablet PC, so I'm wondering how well linux works as a tablet PC.

I recently put Ubuntu (Slackware was getting troublesome) on my X41 tablet and standard laptop stuff is working pretty well. It's the tablet stuff that's not as perfect. Right now I'm missing auto screen rotation, fingerprint reading, and HDAPS parking. Screen rotation and HDAPS parking sound relatively easy to do, but I'm not sure how well fingerprint reading is going to work (ease of use wise)

Xournal is pretty good. I like it better than Microsoft's Journal. Xournal's just missing handwriting recognition.

Also, the rest of the desktop is missing handwriting recognition by default. I think Windows does this well, but it's not perfect. Sometimes you have to manually activate the handwriting input panel and that can be slow.

I've also got a decent multiple desktop solution and X's middle-click paste on windows and there's also cygwin. It's kind of an OK fix, but I'd prefer to use Linux for KDE (or GNOME). It's just I haven't seen any good examples of tablet PC integration on linux. I've mostly seen examples of people getting hardware to work. It's a great first step, but just recognizing the stylus even if it is not good enough to take handwritten notes on is not working. Recognizing the fingerprint reader but not being able to use it to log on easily is not working. Etc.

I want to be pragmatic about it. I'd like to use linux, but I don't mind using windows if linux is not going to be good enough. Linux works just fine powering my laptop as a standard laptop... just not a tablet PC (yet?).

So basically, how useful is your linux on your tablet pc? Do you take handwritten notes (for math, science, etc.)? Do you use it to draw stuff?

Here's my Linux Tablet PC experience:

I've switched back to Slackware. Firefox on kubuntu-desktop wasn't very stable. Firefox would crash multiple times in one day when I alt+tabbed and it was getting annoying. I wasn't sure if it was due to Kubuntu's version of KDE. I wanted to see if vanilla KDE would fair better so figured I'd give Slackware (slackware's pretty vanilla) and honest try before going back to Ubuntu.

Stock Slackware install was missing my wireless firmware (ipw2200). Once that was installed and rc.inet1.conf was configured, I could go online to figure out how to get other things working. I had to modprobe a few things to get frequency scaling working. Suspend worked out of the box, although to get it to resume flawlessly, I had to add a kernel boot option. I didn't get hibernate working from a stock install though.

After this point, my laptop was a good laptop. I was pretty impressed. All it took was some configuring. No downloading, no recompling, nothing. All that were left were the exotic stuff: tablet, hdaps, and the fingerprint reader.

To get the stylus working, I had to download the linuxwacom driver and edit xorg.conf. It was pretty easy. To get the stylus working after sleep, took a little bit more work since I was new to the acpi scripts.

I used Xournal for my note taking application. A few gnome libraries were needed but they were easily compiled and installed.

Tablet mode with the screen rotated does work (on Slack at least). The screen rotates fine, but the stylus isn't oriented correctly (it's stuck at landscape). Perhaps Ubuntu fares better? Anybody have experience with this?

Right now, Slackware is about as useful as my Ubuntu installation. It also seems more stable (I haven't been annoyed), but it did require more work to set up. I could try Ubuntu 7.10 with the kde package next time I have to reboot and see how it goes.

On both installs, I'm still missing HDAPS parking and the fingerprint reader. I haven't been missing them though since I'm not really using the tablet feature much these days.

So referring to my original post, more of the exotic stuff works on windows than on linux. I haven't found an integrated handwriting and inking system for linux. There is CellWriter which I haven't tried yet, but it's block recognition and you have to train it. For basic laptop stuff though, I enjoy using linux and I don't miss Windows one bit.

I have written up an install log/notes for Slack on this computer if anybody is interested. I'm thinking of posting it on thinkwiki or someplace similar. Right now I'm letting my machine run for a while to see if anything crops up so I can add to it. Most of the information is scattered on thinkwiki.org anyway, but it's nice to have Slackware specific notes to make sure nothing is forgotten or to help get stuff up and running quickly.

i like the details. now only if the screen rotation can be calibrated at every position.

I use Fedora for my X41 Tablet. Primarily because thinkwiki has really useful info on how to get stuff setup. And it's quick to setup

Journal Program: Xournal (Asked author about window resizing when changing resolution; is working on a fix)

Input: Cellwriter/Onestroke (courtesy of risujin.org; Onestroke was his old program. I love cellwriter; runs fast, gnome integration and can input recognition by training with its own on screen keyboard. Looks a lot better than gOK and other on-screen keyboard apps.

Fingerprint: Thinkfinger (no problems; in Fedora repos)

HDAPS: Haven't bothered about this (thinkwiki has a howto)

Screen Rotation: rotate script (downside is window resizing and inability to use when compiz is on)

Aside from that, I do my homework in fluxbox. Not any major problems. But you gotta check out cellwriter. It's up there with Xournal.