Yes, that is Plasma Active, and yes I am the fresh owner of that tablet. Don’t ask about the hole in my pocket. It’s a Viewsonic Viewpad 10 that came with Android and Windows 7. Well, it runs Android and Plasma Active (on OpenSUSE) now ;)
Also I just enrolled for this AI class. Coolbeans.
A little swamped right now, and as is often the case during times when I am swamped, lots of interesting things are going on and I’m itching to write stuff. Time however, is scarce :( We’ll see what happens.
(Linux + Touch = <3 <3 <3)
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dai1313
Let me guess, you got a tablet just so you could try plasma active.
How does it run? I am curious.
Jason "moofang"
Heh, well not just plasma active, planning to try gnome 3 and such on it as well. But mostly plasma active xD
It’s about what you’d expect from pre-beta software. Out-the-box functionality is pretty decent. Some things are really nice, but some other fairly basic things are missing. For example I just finished manually getting screen-rotation to work by binding shortcuts to xrandr scripts – and even then the shell itself doesn’t rotate well.
Still, I’m digging how it’s working on my tablet so far. I’m steadily getting it to do everything I’d like a tablet to be able to do. Most existing KDE apps, the non-“activated” ones, are also remarkably usable via touch. Basically it’s already good enough that I’m more than happy to stick on it and carry it around without booting into android. It’s also a bonus that since it’s OpenSUSE underneath it’s basically a full fledged linux, with all the power that entails.
dai1313
Oh, Enlightenment has had a tablet friendly interface for years and years. That might also be worth giving a shot. I would describe it as fast+simple+annoying_to_set_up.
Also, I don’t know if on screen keyboard works in gnome 3 yet. I have seen videos where it works but I can’t seem to get the damn thing to start on my computer. I have not tried very hard though as I have never needed it.
Also I was reading another blog. http://rubenerd.com/kde-shirt/ This guy found a place to get good quality KDE shirts – I thought you might be interested.
MaTachi
That’s so cool! I didn’t even it was possible to run Linux in a good way on tablets. :P ^^ Is it just as easy to install Linux on a tablet as it’s on a normal PC?
Jason "moofang"
Hey guys sorry for the late replies
@dai1313 I just went and did some searching and I’m quite impressed by what i see (e17 touch interface that is). I remember being somewhat impressed by an early beta of e17 some time ago and used to carry around a live slax distro running it in my pocket. Makes me wonder how is e17 staying so fringe-world after all this time. But yeah, for now I’m sticking on Plasma Active for daily use, since it’s all set up now and works awesome. When I can next spare time for some happy hacking I’ll try and get me e17 on my baby too ^^ ah all the fun things I’d do if I had infinite time.
Also thanks for the link on KDE shirts. Never quite thought of getting me some Linux swag before but you got me thinking now :P
@MaTachi Well right now it still depends quite abit on your definition of “good way” :P Plasma Active is still on beta, though first release is scheduled next month I think. Easiness of install – well, I think it’s tablet dependant. I deliberately bought an x86 tablet and checked beforehand that it had a bios that let me boot from USB – so if you’re careful to pick tablets with these parameters, it’s basically identical to a normal PC – just have a usb keyboard/mouse handy in case you need them. Also, depending on your hardware, you may need higher kernel versions than some distros provide to have proper touch support – my tablet runs OpenSUSE tumbleweed to get a later kernel version.
MaTachi
Ah, sounds interesting.
And I think it’s really nice to see that there are open alternatives to iPad and Android. :)
Jason "moofang"
Yeah :) Things are at least going fairly well for free software on the tablet form factor. The phone side of things on the other hand is a depressing story :(