Well, I've got a few new things to report afa user experiences go. First, I just bought my first laptop. I've had second-hand laptops in the past, but this is the first time I've bought a new one.
I walked into Staples (sort of a box-store for office supplies/etc.) and the sales guys immediately started to hver around me. To the first guy, I said, I'm willing to buy a new laptop immediately if you can show me one that will provide a good linux experience. He almost cried, but commission can make people do strange things. So he got the manager, and the manager started to deal with me personally as no one else had even heard of linux. Manager says: I haven't tried linux on any of these laptops, but we have this EEe thing here with linux on it. After informing him that I wanted a higher end computer, he decided to do whatever was required to make me happy.
So he logged one of the laptops onto the internal network, and asked me for the model numbers I was interested in - he started using google to find out what was supported. The Acer laptops, and some Dells, were 100% supported, so I knew that I'd have at least a few good options. However, there was this shiny, smallish (maybe 12 inch screen) HP sitting there with a touch screen, which could be used as a tablet PC. If I could get this thing running linux, I'd be in business.
After sitting on Google with the manager for a while, we discovered what devices in the HP tx2500 series were and were not support, and which ones I might get working if I'm willing to do some old-school kernel patching. In other words, support for the thing is not "out of the box", unlike some of the other laptops... still...
So I bought the thing - paid cash - and brought it home. Unpacked the thing to find Windows Vista Home Premium. Other than being very slow on a reasonably fast machine, my first real Vista experience hasn't been that bad - after I removed Norton, yahoo toolbar, HP's marketing bullshit, and so forth. The thing didn't come with recovery disks, sadly, so I had to create them after unpacking the thing - ah well, I guess that means my Vista install better live forever, or else it'll be impossible to recover later (it'd probably want to nuke my linux partitions).
It didn't come with any sane way to burn the Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 DVD iso, so I had to install a toy to do it. Works well enough. As far as ease of use goes, once installing the toy, I could right click on the iso to burn it. I wonder if k3b does this?
Anyway, thanks to the help of parada on irc, I'm pretty comfortable with trying to install linux on this and to have all the devices work, including the wacom touch screen. Can someone tell me how the hell the wacom screen can sense the pen before I touch it?
Next update: post linux install. Cheers folks.
Edit: Oh, also installed KDE/Windows on it - other than knotify4 crashing when trying to use phonon.dll, it works swimmingly. (just no notifications)
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