Hello all,

I found a second hand Acer Iconia TAB W500 - for those who don't know the 
beast, it's an X86 Tablet with an optional usb keyboard and relatively modest 
specs (an AMD dual core C-50 at 1GHz).

The fun of this project was to see if a Linux Tablet is usable.

It turns out (not surprisingly) that Linux does run very happily on this 
machine, but that as good as no distribution (that I have found) offers a 
sensible user interface for a touch screen.

Debian stable + Gnome 3 is unusable (stays stuck all the time).
openSuSE with KDE 4 looks nice but I could not find a way to get the UI 
elements in a size usable with my fingers.

The best I got yet is Ubuntu with Unity. It's a disaster when it comes to 
administrate the computer, but it's the best UI for usability.

While researching for this project I re-read what KDE 4 devs had said about 
having to give up KDE 3 because it was not "touchfriendly", so I tried TDE on 
Ubuntu. Now, TDE is actually very usable on a touchscreen. There is ONE 
problem - I can't find a way to activate an onscreen keyboard.

Ubuntu/Unity starts a tool called "onboard" that works almost as expected 
(does not always seem to see if an external keyboard is present). It seems to 
be linked to lightdm.

I can try to run Trinity with lightdm. Or has anyone a suggestion as to how to 
get an onscreen keyboard with tdm?

Ah, and there would also be the problem of emulating the right mouse button 
click. Without this it's very difficule to work in tablet mode.

Happy easter!

Thierry