The Raven X41 Linux Tablet PC by EmperorLinux
posted September 30th 2005 11:50AM
Linux has matured greatly on the desktop, but it's still mostly an also-ran in the laptop space, mainly due to that crazy specialized hardware that manufactures put into their portables—like batteries. The Tablet PC brings a whole 'nother batch of features to support, including portrait to landscape view switching, pen based input, and the mother of them all; handwriting recognition. The RavenX41 by EmperorLinux, based on the Lenovo Thinkpad X41, is a—you guessed it—Linux based Tablet PC with support for all of the above features, along with full utilization of the Thinkpad's biometric fingerprint scanner. They claim the handwriting recognition should work as well as that of a certain other manufacturer, but their system takes longer to learn your style. Also, the pen will work as a pressure sensitive input device in GIMP, helping your inner nerd get in touch with your inner artist. It sounds like EmperorLinux has put a good deal of thought into their laptop offerings, the special features are supported by an independent kernel that integrates with several popular flavors of Linux allowing you choosey open sourcers to pick what works best for you. The downside of all this is that EmperorLinux is marking up the laptops by a few hundred dollars or so to recoup their costs (should run you around $2350-$2950 depending on configuration) so you're losing out on one of the main advantages of the Linux OS: Free, as in free beer.
Those prices are crazy high, Linux isn't that hard to make work that they have to get such steep prices. Send them a old IBM T20 and for the low price of $350 they will install a linux distro !
Linux isn't that hard to make work, but the biometric device and TPM on the ThinkPads could well be, and hardwriting rec isn't child's play either. Value-adds, baby.
I'm running Linux on my m200 tablet and I'd happily pay $350 to have a third party completely set it up with all the esoteric features (screen rotation, power management, pen input, etc) and support it going forward. The advantages of running Linux outweight the hassle for me, and I've got just about every little detail working, but the fact remains that even for an expert there are lots of little details to attend to. Hardware drivers are often not supported by vendors, so there is a lot of guesswork involved. As new releases of Linux components come out, things tend to break (until they settle down). So this would be great value for someone like me (except I much prefer the M200 over the Lenova offering).
To add aother point, they are just not going to have the volume of a Windows release, for all their work they'll maybe sell hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, so I think what they are charging is realistic.
I bought a tiny, value-added laptop from the EmperorLinux people, after swallowing hard about the extra $400-500. It's been totally worth it. All the strange and proprietary laptop hardware worked perfectly. Somebody who's unfamiliar with Linux could buy one of their systems and have no worse a learning curve than an XP person buying a Mac. I have a non-standard wireless network at home, and they spent days, literally days, to help me get it set up. Their tech support people actually answer the phone, and actually answer questions. As the company gets more popular, it's taking them longer if it's something they can't answer immediately, but they find the answers. I'd say I've had the value of that extra $500 returned and then some. And at least on the laptops, they provide dual boot systems, so that if there's some new piece of hardware that simply won't work with Linux yet, you can always boot into XP and use it that way.
Peace of mind is more important than any amount of money. Linux is more stable and secure than windows. Preinstalled linux on a machine is God gifted thing. And if its a tablet, its just simply heaven for a Linux newbie geek.