Please recommend a distro for a tablet PC - touchscreen a must
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I've used Puppy in the past and somewhat familiar with both Ubuntu and Mint. I really have no preference but it must be easy to learn and allow me to use the touchscreen. There is only one USB port but I plug in a hub which allows me 4 peripherals. At my desk I prefer a physical keyboard and mouse although there will be times when I want to disconnect the hub and use the touchscreen and virtual keyboard.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Any distro that can use KDE would be my bet for a touchscreen. So, any distro.
KDE can be adapted endlessly and many things with ease. I've seen alot of options in KDE that would work for a touchscreen, although I have never used it, because I think touchscreen interfaces are ugly. With KDE you could make a combination that is still not ugly, but works well for some touchscreen usage.
FWIW, I use about half a dozen tablet PCs, all running Debian with XFCE4 desktop environment. The touch and Wacom stylus input devices all worked out-of-box, although the wacom stylus calibration needed to be adjusted a bit on the Fujitsu T5010. The models I've installed on include:
I've also installed on a couple touch screen laptops, and touch worked out-of-box on them. I've had no problems with UEFI installs and booting, but these have all been on 64 bit machines. I've read that it's more iffy with 32 bit UEFI (as already noted in this thread). The Debian installer does detect UEFI and does that type of install, unless you go through extra hoops to tell it to do an old fashioned MBR type GRUB install.
Debian with XFCE4 runs very nicely with 2GB of RAM. One of my main laptops has 2GB of RAM; I use it a lot despite its weaker specs because it's got good battery life. (I got it second hand, and it's really hard to upgrade the RAM.) I also run Debian on a lot of computers with much less RAM, as well as computers with effectively less RAM because I use this customized technique I call "RAMBOOT" - the entire OS is loaded into RAM uncompressed. On my laptop with 3GB of RAM, over half of the RAM is consumed by the RAMBOOT OS file system (note that Puppy stores its OS file system in a compressed state, and its stripped down in various ways to make it fit better).
The big question is how to get the thing to boot what you want. If you can get it to boot off of USB anything, then you can install /boot onto a small USB drive while putting the main OS partition on the internal drive. This may be a bit annoying since you need that USB drive around when you wish to boot up, but I'd find it an acceptable option.
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