present tense

To use a tablet computer comfortably, you have to be able to rotate the screen in all four directions.

Under Windows this is handled nicely by one of three soft buttons to the side of the monitor. You just tap this button with the pen and the screen rotates 90 degrees. Additional taps will keep it going around. Unfortunately these soft buttons are not recognized by Linux, at least not out-of-the-box. However, a relatively simple hack described here makes it possible to do this easily, if not elegantly, under Linux.

I 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.