Tablet Computing
Sunday, December 17th, 2006I recently finished an eight year stint with a large corporation and had to give up my standard issue corporate laptop and buy my own. I already owned a good deskside computer which I bought in preparation for a return to self employment but I can’t imagine functioning without a portable anymore.
A tablet computer seemed like a good choice because I feel that the more input and output channels a computer has the more useful it will be. Also I had a tablet in the early nineties and I thought it was pretty cool then. It’s surprising that tablet computing hasn’t been more successful. There are only a limited number of models available and, consequently, only a limited amount of software that takes advantage of the pen features.
After talking about it with Sean Russell, who loves his HP TC4200, I decided to get the new version, the TC4400. At four and a half pounds it was a bit heavier than I was hoping for but, quite simply, I was seduced by power and money (a dual core Pentium, a gig of RAM and a good deal on eBay).
I planned to install GNU Linux on the tablet immediately. I thought that I would keep a dual boot capability for a little while just to make sure that I could access the key features of the machine under Linux. But I found found myself in a disagreeable entanglement with Microsoft’s programmer lawyers within the first ten minutes of using the machine. As a result, I deleted Windows XP completely, reformatted the disk and, despite the fact that some features of the laptop are not immediately accessible under Linux, I have no regrets.I’m confident that all of the issues will be resolved in a reasonable amount of time and I’ll post all of the fixes I install on a separate page so other prospective users of the TC4400 can move directly to Linux without hesitating.
