Tablet PCs Are Back in Style

Technology, like fashion, runs in cycles.
Every few years, bell-bottoms and plaids tend to reappear, and so
does COBOL, Amiga hardware emulation and, that old chestnut, the
tablet computer.This year's PCExpo in New York City featured a number of new
tablet computing products designed to run Microsoft Windows XP
Tablet Edition, which will be released in early November 2002. The
idea behind tablet PCs, however, has been around since the Apple
Newton. In fact, the new implementations are not all that
innovative--they simply take advantage of more powerful, lighter
hardware.The main stumbling block in tablet PC incarnations
historically has been size and power consumption. To be truly
"tablet-like" requires a small footprint and a massive touchscreen,
difficult constraints for pre-2000 hardware.Tablet PCs have been around for about twenty years and are
usually defined as having a large, touch-enabled screen that uses
character recognition and "digital ink" as the central user-input
method. Not counting PDAs, there are currently three types of
tablet PCs:

• Larger tablets, such as the Access Qbe or the
  ViewSonic ViewPad. These pads, often called webpads, usually act as
  standalone, portable computers and have built-in wireless
  networking.
• The "convertible tablet". A laptop PC, like the
  Fujitsu LifeBook P-1000, with a reversible screen that allows users
  to flip the screen over to cover the keyboard. Corel, of
  WordPerfect fame, currently is working on a collaborative system
  with these PCs that would allow engineers and artists to share
  comments and graphics in on-line meetings.
• The base station tablet. Docked tablet PCs, such as
  the HP Meritage, have a number of interesting features. These
  machines dock with a networked base station for portability. That
  doesn't allow for much roaming, though, but many are networked
  wirelessly to the dock or to a wireless access point.

Mordy Ovits, a Linux user in New York City, has been using
the Fujitsu Stylistic tablet PCs that he bought for "about $50" as
wireless webpads and X11 terminals. He is running a 2.2.17 kernel
on them that required little tweaking. He said that the
installation wasn't difficult, but it took time trying to find the
right drivers.Because the latest systems are simply PCs with touchscreens,
Linux installations should be fairly painless. Indeed, Ovits says
that his installation took less talent than time. The hardest part
was solving the problem of pen interaction. "It's only recently
that Linux got usable with a pen, mostly due to interest in the
iPaq", he says. He believes that the current crop of handheld
applications at
handhelds.org helped with
his search to build the perfect tablet PC.On-line, programmers at
www.linuxslate.org
have successfully written drivers for X11 using the pen as a
pointer. Coupled with their calibration program, fpitcal, to ensure
proper pointing and xscribble, one of the better handwriting
recognition systems for Linux, you have a fully functioning tablet
PC.Installing pen drivers is as simple as installing any other
pointing device. First, set up the serial device to correctly
accept input from the digitizer:

setserial /dev/ttyS3 autoconfig
setserial /dev/ttyS3 IRQ 15 baud_base 115200

Then make the fpit driver, and add the following lines to
your XF86Config file:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "mouse0"
    Driver        "fpit"
    Option        "Device"    "/dev/ttyS3"
    Option        "BaudRate"    "19200"
    Option        "MaximumXPosition"    "6250"
    Option        "MaximumYPosition"    "4950"
    Option        "MinimumXPosition"    "130"
    Option        "MinimumYPosition"    "0"
    Option        "InvertY"
EndSection

Ovitz said that space was tight on his Stylistics tablet, but
he got a standard installation of Mandrake to work without any
changes to the basic kernel. Future tablet computers should be much
easier to configure and install as the digitizer code base enters
mainstream distributions."I suppose it will get easier with time", Mordy says. "It
reminded me of getting Linux usable in the mid 90s. It was rough,
but you could see the glimmer of a sparkling future."ResourcesFujitsuHandhelds.orgLinuxSlate.comThe
LabsViewSonicJohn D. Biggs is a writer
and consultant living in Brooklyn, New York.

email: john@bigwidelogic.com