I’ve been using linux as my main platform for ages and ages … but this doesn’t live in harmony with new laptops especially tabletPCs. Typically on getting a new laptop I had about a month of head-banging frustration to look forward to as I tried to get the power management, modem, wifi, external screen, bluetooth, and of course the tablet pen all to play nicely. Not good.
Plus, there are two applications that are worth running in windows: pdfannotator and mindmanager, both of which make a tablet useful.
So for my next tablet (a Fujitsu T4220) I decided to try a different approach. That, and I also wanted my screen mirrored on an external LCD and a projector at the same time, but upside down on the tablet only, and I wanted to turn my whiteboard interactive via something like ebeam …. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen easily with linux. So inspired by Charlie Stross, I down-graded to XP grabbed virtualbox and installed kubuntu as a virtual machine.
So far it sort of works. Well it’s quite good actually. The main problem is stability, XP seems to last about a week before needing a reboot (things get pathetically slow or simply crash). On the other hand, what this setup buys me is being able to run all the peripherals without hassles and to easily switch to using pdfannotator or mindmanager without a reboot.
Most of the time I ignore XP and live happily in my virtual machine…