The distribution I have chosen is Arch Linux. It’s not an “everything works without having edit configuration files” distribution, but with a laptop with special hardware (i.e., tablet pc), you end doing it anyway. In addition to this, I like its principles, the community (AUR, forums, mailing lists) around it, and the wiki :).

Base installation

The laptop does not have a optical drive so we can install booting from USB or from network via PXE. First I tried the simplest case: boot from a USB drive. But the last stable (this word is not appropriate on a rolling release distribution, but I expect you will understand the idea) installer release does not include drivers for the Ethernet or the Wifi, leading to a almost useless installation. So, I used a “non-official” boot image with the kernel 2.6.28, which supports all my networking options. But, I didn’t discovered why, but this image doesn’t boot on my laptop. The screen goes blank with the message “Boot Error”. Then, I tried to boot from network using this newer image (fortunately, I have a home server that could provide DHCP and PXE), following this guide, and everything worked fine. From this point, everything worked as expected and leaded to a full operational base system with network capabilities.

Apart from the network drivers issue, I spent A LOT of time trying to shrink the Windows partition to gain space for the Linux. The problem was that it had some unmovable files near the end of the partition, that limited how much could it be resized. After playing with several defragmentation tools (even some of them commercial software in trial version mode), I could gain enough space to be happy :).

On next posts I’m going to talk about how to configure the system to use most of the hardware (rotation and touch screen, special buttons, bluetooth, etc.).

Desde hace tiempo que tengo entendido que el hardware de los Thinkpad suele dar buenos resultados con GNU/Linux, por lo que respecta a compatibilidad. Así que empecé a analizar los modelos bastante esperanzado. A dia de hoy, los modelos Tablet PC son los pertenecientes a la Serie X Tablet. No confundir con la Serie X, a secas :P. Tienen dos gamas, la X60 i la X61, y realmente son muy parecidos. Me ha dado la impresión que solo cambian un poco la tecnología de pantalla, y que uno ofrece algunas opciones adicionales como “32-byte hard drive password & BIOS port lock down”. Bueno, sí, y que por ejemplo uno tiene un Core Duo y el otro un Core 2 Duo, etc. Pero ya son temas de “potencia”, que repercuten en si el hardware “delicado”, como la pantalla táctil, esta bien soportado o no. Por cierto, dentro de cada gama (X60 y X61), hay múltiples modelos, en función de processor concreto, etc. Para muestra, un botón.

Las instalaciones parecen ser sencillitas, dentro del ámbito de los Tablet PC con GNU/Linux. O sea, tocar unos cuantos ficheros de configuración e instalar algunos programas/scripts. Ejemplos en Gentoo, Arch y Ubuntu.

Ale, uno más que añadir a la lista de posibles candidatos. Al final, a falta de un vencedor claro, me están saliendo un montón de posibilidades. Con la pereza que me da ponerme a analizarlos más en detalle :S.