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Ubuntu on my Toshiba Tecra M4

21 May
I do try Linux from time to time to see what all the fuss is about. This time I downloaded the latest Ubuntu distro, the Dapper Drake Flight 7. I tried the live CD. I was amazed that it detected every hardware on my Tecra M4. It booted up in the right resolution, all my pointing devices were working, my WiFi was up, Ethernet was up…

For the first time I felt that this Linux distro looks better than Windows XP. The fonts were great. The web pages looked good. Since I liked it I clicked the “Install” icon on the desktop and installed it on a newly created partition. And I had Ubuntu dual booting! (Well thats a lie I messed up during partitioning and deleted the windows installation. Luckily I have all me data on a separate partition and the loss was minimal ;-) )

After messing around Ubuntu a bit I was looking at the device manager and got a big surprise. It actually recognized the digitizer on my Tablet PC! But the pen did not work. I googled a bit and found that all I had to do was change the device in xorg.conf and the pen started working! Well there is no handwriting recognition but I can use it as a pointing device. Plus I found this note taking tool called Gournal which is kind of like Windows Journal. Pretty cool. I think I will stick with Ubuntu a little longer this time. ;-)

Related posts:

  1. Ubuntu on my Thinkpad X61 Tablet
  2. Bye Bye Linux, Welcome Windows Server 2003.
  3. Portable Ubuntu: Run linux as an app in Windows
  4. Getting a Toshiba Tecra M4 Tablet PC
  5. Toshiba Tecra M4 In-Depth Review

 
3 Comments

Posted in Software, Tablet PC

 
 
 

  1. Miroslav Beranič ml.

    May 24, 2006 at 5:34 AM

    Greetings!

    nice post, I was looking for a start. I own Toshiba Tecra M4. I will try it out too.

    I thought only Windows XP Tablet PC are able to run tablets.

     

  2. Vasanth

    May 24, 2006 at 5:52 AM

    Well I guess any OS which has the proper driver can use the tablet digitizer. But from a utility point of view Windows Tablet Edition is way better than Linux at the moment. But I hope tablet PCs catch on on Linux.

     

  3. Miroslav Beranič

    May 25, 2006 at 5:30 AM

    I installed Kubuntu. But it did not find my tablet, so I went to Ubuntu. Ubuntu was quite nice it found wacom tablet but had no luck of makeing it to work.

    I switched over to SuSE 10.0. It has better support for my hardware, but I am still missing Bluetooth support. In SuSE LCD can dim in long life configuration, where in Ubuntu that is not possible. I am about to make SuSE 10.1 DVD now and try with this version.

    Can you post your xorg.conf config section, how to set up sylus currectly? That would be alot of help.