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Hardware

Pen-Based Linux Computing? 25

Posted by Cliff from the mightier-than-the-sword dept.
geekindustries asks: "Looking around auction sites I have seen a fair amount of old pen-based computers for really cheap. These machines usually run a pen-based version of DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95a. However, I feel that these machines would be much better off running Linux as opposed to a bulky Microsoft OS. Has anyone heard of pen-based Linux solutions and how to get them working on old hardware?" Larger than a PDA, but smaller than a laptop, these resemble webpads or Star Trek like PADDs. They've been around for a while, but hasn't quite broken into the consumer market, yet. Which pen-based platforms, old and new, work best with Linux?
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Pen-Based Linux Computing? More

Pen-Based Linux Computing?

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  • will -that- make you happy?

  • macs? (Score:2, Informative)

    by littlerubberfeet ( 453565 )
    There were these things for disabled mac users. They were clear plastic that went over the monitor that you could use to control the cursor. They had standard ADB input, so drivers weren't an issue, you just set the cursor speed to 'tablet' in the mouse contol panel, in other words, a one to one movement ratio. Easy to do in Linux, right?

    Now, if you can find one of these, you could concievably get an adapter to hook the ADB to USB and use a G4.

    Now you have a touchscreen/pen based Linux/BSD box.

  • Examples? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick.The.Red@gma i l .com> on Monday June 10, 2002 @05:58PM (#3675504) Journal
    A search of eBay [ebay.com] for "pen-based computer" [ebay.com] turns up nothing. Care to specify the exact make and model you're looking at? (also, how much are they going for?)

    • better search examples (Score:2, Informative)

      by joshuac ( 53492 )
      ---snip
      A search of eBay [ebay.com] for "pen-based computer" [ebay.com] turns up nothing. Care to specify the exact make and model you're looking at? (also, how much are they going for?)
      ---snip

      replace the "-" with a space (you were filtering out all hits that _included_ "based") and you get one hit. Take out the entire word "based", and it gets you 13 hits. Use look at the terminology used for these devices, and I'm sure you'll get even more.
    • I was thinking along the lines of the IBM Thinkpad 730T, which I found on eBay for a nice price. Now all I need to do is get it working so I can play freeciv [freeciv.org] from my living room.

  • Aquapad (Score:2, Informative)

    by NotoriousQ ( 457789 )
    This cool little device showed a lot of promise and was not expensive. Aquapad [aquapad.org].
    I have not heard it in the news for a while though.
    • I've been playing with one at the moment. It looks pretty good, and seems to work well. Performance is quite acceptable.

      I've only had it here a couple of days, and I need to set up some network connectivity for it before I can really kick into it...

  • Need more input (with apologies to Johnny 5) (Score:3, Informative)

    by ninewands ( 105734 ) on Monday June 10, 2002 @06:39PM (#3675697)
    If you mean something on the lines of the IBM 730T I found when I searched ebay [ebay.com] I don't see any reason why not. I appears to run Win95 which indicates that it's at least a 386 processor. It uses a Cirrus graphics chip, so getting X to work on the thing might be dicey. My advice would be to do your own research before spending any money unless you make writing device drivers your hobby.

    As for anything older than the 730T, I think your probably going to run into problems like sub-32 bit processors that will stop you.
    • The problem with the 730T is that it has a pcmcia hard drive. I haven't found a distribution yet that can cope with it. My machine has a 486 something and 24 megs of ram. I think the drive was around 100 megs. I did have win95 with pen extensions working on it. Another complication is that I don't have a floppy drive for mine.
  • Sonic Blue is clearancing their Pro Gear 1050 web tablets [sonicblue.com]. They run linux on a TMTA processor, 128 MB of RAM, and a 5 gig hard drive They also have 802.11b cards and a PCMCIA slot. I had never heard of them prior to seeing the clearance sale, so I can't say anything about using it but it looks like it was a pretty nice little pad. The price is 599 USD while they last, when iniatally created they were 2800 USD.
    • Just went and tried to buy one at $599, and the price came up at $2799 when I put it in the cart... I'll keep trying - I definitely want one, and at $600, I can almost afford it... :)

      Robin Pardey
  • The Aquapad [fic.com.tw] is ready to go today [aquapad.org]. It uses the Crusoe processor and runs Midori Linux or Windows CE. I don't know if the touch-screen code can be ported to your favorite distro.
  • I periodically look at this url: Fujitsu 510 on eBay [ebay.com]

    To see what the current prices are like. Rumours amoung the handhelds.org group suggest that linux works fairly well on these devices.
  • The Labs [the-labs.com] has a section on internet appliances, including home-brew refurbishing of older pen-based PCs. They have advice for loading Linux and BSD on the Fujistu Stylistic 1000 [the-labs.com] and 1200 [the-labs.com]. Both [ebay.com] models [ebay.com] can be found on eBay.
  • ...but the latest Linux kernel is gonna be just as godawful slow and bulky on an ancient pen-based tablet as an old version of DOS or Windows will be, perhaps even slower.

    I've got an old 486 laptop that I got from work (it's been replaced several times over) that I thought would be a decent candidate for Linux. And I guess it was -- if you enjoyed being able to watch the screen refresh itself in X, or listening to the hard drive chatter as it slowly ran out of physical RAM and ate into swap -- and all I was doing was running X in 8 bit color with an "aterm" open!

    You're going to be using a machine without a keyboard, which pretty much necessitates X windows (and a newer version at that!) and a newer kernel. If you don't want to get any use out of your tablet PC, then, by all means, use Linux! It'll run "xscreensaver" really nice, as long as you only use "life" or "rotor" mode.

    - A.P.
    • A friend of mine, a decade or so ago, showed me an IBM tablet running Windows. 486DX-50, which was a wicked-fast machine at the time. He talked about trying to find a bit of software called "Pen for OS/2", so he could load his OS of choice and not have to tote a keyboard wherever he went. Nice machine - I remember a good TFT display, and generally slick-looking design. It'd probably run a 2.0 kernel great, though 2.2 seems to be a bit slower on such machines. 2.4 and glibc has been almost unusable on every 486 I've tried it on. If a box like this could be located, -and- some manner of handwriting software which isn't positively maddening, it'd be a fine machine for doing light work with remote X apps.

      It might also be worth investigating keeping whatever Windows preload, along with the handwriting software, installed, and use something like eXceed to display X.

      On the other hand of the spectrum, a lot of slower computers just aren't up to the task of running a modern OS - at ALL.

      I've got an NCR Safari 3170 running Linux. It is a 386SLC at 25MHz. It feels a bit quicker than other 386s I've used, probably due to the RAM and caching controllers being built into the CPU (!) (this thing has a higher transistor count than a 486DX).

      It ran Slackware 3.0 for a few days, with 4 megs of RAM, and a 150 meg hard drive of JVC manufacture.

      Even in textmode, it was swapping too much for anything but being a telnet-based terminal.

      Not long after that, I rounded up a 2.1 gig drive and an extra 8 megs of RAM for the thing, which helped so much that I decided to configure X for it.

      The decisively odd PhoenixView chipset is, probably obviously, unsupported so I was stuck in plain VGA mode. 640x480 has never been enough for most things X. Watching that tiny display refresh with 4-bit greyscale made me sick - it took several seconds to scroll down -one line- in a remote Netscape session. Some of that could be due to the PCMCIA NE2000 ethernet card I equipped it with, which is only good for about 75kBps inbound on the machine. The Windows 3.x preload, which had genuine PhoenixView drivers, was also pretty slow.

      I can't imagine trying to do useful, modern graphical things with a machine of this calibre, unless it involves ncurses or, perhaps, aalib.

      It is positively wonderful as a terminal for my headless FreeBSD machine. It uses very little power (10W or less, from all appearances), and consumes very little desk space (being from the era preceeding the arrival of 16" "notebook" displays, it is quite a bit smaller than most current portables). And it, as well as the parts laptop I used to breathe life into it, the 8 meg RAM upgrade, and hard drive, were free.

      Dead reliable, too. Uptime of 33 days at this time.

      I guess the point is this: Old computers can still do useful things, as long as the software being run on them is in-keeping with what was common when they were new. Old Slackware releases are nice for this, if for no reason other than that they are easy to find and that, historically, Slackware has always been fairly light-weight and efficient.

      Old software like this may be full of old holes, but who cares? It sits on my desk, in my apartment, behind a locked door and a nailed-down firewall. If anyone manages to get past either of those security measures, I've got a lot more to worry about than a compromised 10-year-old laptop.
      • I don't know of a chipset that was ever called "PhoenixView", but I do know that that was the name of Phoenix's generic VGA BIOS product. I get the feeling the chip in your machine was either one of NCR's own (like the 77C22), or a *very* early Cirrus or AcuMOS chip (most likely the the AVGA2/CL-GD5420).

        -lee
        • Interesting.

          I'll take another peek inside of it (or its partially-(dis)assembled brother) and see what I find.

          I do doubt, somewhat, that it has much similarity to any of NCR's own designs. The ghosts of usenet past seem to indicate that the product appeared at the same time that NCR was being bought by AT&T, and that NCR was embarassed to have their name on such a finickey, expensive machine.

          It's been good to me, though.

          Thanks for the pointer on the meaning of PhoenixView.
  • I have a Stylistic 1000 pen notebook running linux with the pen tools installed.

    486-100
    16mb Ram
    340mb PCMCIA Hard Drive.

    Neat little box - I've had a variety of Linux installs on it over the years. (I used PLIP for networking when I first got it - couldn't afford an ethernet card for it.)

    Installing was a bit of a pain - I didn't have a floppy drive or a bootable CD-ROM drive. Latest install is Redhat 5.something, with XFree86 3.something, running the xf86fpit drivers for the pen, and Xscribble for handwriting recogition, both from http://www.linuxslate.org/software.html

    Works well enough. Takes several minutes to boot, but once you're in and running netscape it isn't too bad. Having to switch between 'Mouse-mode' and 'Keyboard-mode' for the pen is annoying, as are the more obscure gestures that leave you in control character mode or something. I seem to recall that it was a bit of a pain finding the documentation on what characters do what.

    Kahm
  • Touch screen tech, modern processor, etc.

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