Lately, I have been spending some quality time again with my TC1000 from Compaq.  I purchased mine last year, along with two friends of mine.  We all have taken different approaches to making the tablets work well.

I have been using the tablet off and on since then, with most of the functionality available while logged in, but there have been a few rough edges.  With a tablet PC, how do I log into the tablet while it is undocked from the keyboard?  I have used a great on-screen keyboard/handwriting recognition tool called Cellwriter.  It requires a little training, but the tool is very accurate after training.  There are two instances where a user needs to enter a password, when logging in and when unlocking the screensaver.

  • Login: I use Gnome, so GDM is the login manager I prefer on this tablet.  Changing the configuration was fairly wasy.  The configuration file, in Debian, is /etc/gdm/Init/Default.  I found that a single line, added above the final “exit 0″ line, was enough to add the keyboard: “cellwriter –keyboard-only –window-x 170 –window-y 568 &” and restart X by logging out.
  • Screensaver: The screensaver was slightly more difficult, requiring two steps to configure within gconf-editor:
  1. Enable the embedded_keyboard_enabled key in /apps/gnome-screensaver.
  2. Edit the embeddes_keyboard_command to include: /usr/bin/cellwriter –keyboard-only –xid

I could have chosen one of a number of alternative keyboards, but Cellwriter works so well and looks so clean compared to the other tools I had tried.  There are two issues that I have been dealing with with little success…

First, the –keyboard-only flag is in both locations to run the keyboard without regards to the written input.  I expected to need that during login, as GDM has idea who is logging on until after they have logged on and GDM is no longer needed.  However, I did try to use it normally with the screensaver login, and I could not get gnome-screensaver to accept my known-good password while using the handwriting portion of the application.  While I would like to be able to write my password, your entire password remains on the screen in the input box until you accept the input.  So, I will try to get at working sometime, but it probably better that i have to type my password, keeping it hidden from view.

Second, each of the applications would randomly spam one of the input buttons as I was typing on the screen.  This forces me to have to simply hit the enter key and start again.  At some point, I will have to try using the native fpit driver within Xorg.  I might already be, now that I have upgraded my system to the post-Lenny testing version of Debian (Squeeze).  I haven’t otherwise updated the system’s overall configuration in several months.

So, hopefully, I can start getting even more utility out of this again, without the encumberance of this keyboard.  As much as I would like to try one of the new netbooks, like the Acer Aspire Once or the HP Mini 1000, the lack of a touch screen makes those devices a less-attractive form-factor that this handy piece of gear.