I recently acquired the EXOPC Slate which comes with Windows 7 and the EXO UI. Those that know me, know I have been Windowless for 12 or more years. So, I was currious about this. I wasn’t intending it to end up like this, but it did. I was intending to do a dual boot. Nope. I used an 8 GB thumb drive for the 1.3 GB Plasma Active image. I hit the BBS and chose the drive. It booted successfully and X started and KDE began to load, but so did errors. Saw the KDE crash windows, and then the screen went dark. I waited for a bit, hoping it would load. Nope. OK, well I have the usb keyboard plugged in, so ctrl-alt-backspace, same result. X loaded, KDE started to, crash windows. OK. Ctrl-alt-f1. I am at root prompt, so I type yast and get YaST Ncurses. Joy. So I navigate to Miscelanious and choose Live Installer. Ncurses all the way through. Went with defaults at first, resizing Windows. Installed ok, then got to installing GRUB…Failed. I checked the settings for GRUB. I have it for / instead of MBR but GRUB is complaining of not being below 1024 and refusing to install. OK, I try a different partition scheme. Windows still half the drive, swap, /home and /. GRUB still didn’t like that. OK, so we’ll try Windows half the disk, and swap and /. GRUB still gave the same error. What?! OK. So I resize the Windows partition back to the entire disk, and try to boot into Windows. If you haven’t guessed already…It didn’t work. It complained of no image on disk. Oh boy. Not at all what I wanted. Well guess I am doing Plasma Active now. So I do the entire disk Plasma Active. GRUB is now happy.
My 3 complaints about Plasma Active after having seen Windows 7 on the EXOPC. The Windows 7 on screen keyboard offered a full keyboard. Function keys, ctrl, alt, win, etc. It was litterally like having a full keyboard on the screen. It wasn’t crowed either. Also, in Windows could use 2 points, like pinch and resize. That sort of thing. In Plasma Active 2, no joy. 3 the on screen keyboard doesn’t work will all apps. If you use a non KDE/QT apps, like Firefox or x-chat, then the on screen keyboard doesn’t Work. Malcolm found Maliit and that kinda works.
Plasma Active says they are redoing the keyboard. I hope so. I hear they are also working on the pinch and expand features. The double touch thing. I look forward to those improvements.
I don’t have any Windows software. Or didn’t till this tablet. I did manage to get an ISO of Windows for this tablet to download. but installing it failed. The USB of Windows never loaded. The same USB device works fine for Plasma Active and WeTab. I did try WeTab. I absolutely hated the layout. I found the WeTab way to limiting, unless you want to use console for installing software. The WeTab store was just way to small. The WeTab lasted about a day on my tablet. I went and installed Plasma Active again. This time, the Live USB image loaded with no problems. I was able to bring up YaST>Miscellaneous>Live Installer and get through almost all of it with out a USB keyboard.
I have found, for whatever reason, that plasmaboard (which is what the name of the default on screen keyboard is), isn’t called for apps at root level or for not KDE/QT apps. We are pursuing talks of maliit. I also mentioned CellWritter.
>
> I don’t have any Windows software. Or didn’t till this tablet. I did
> manage to get an ISO of Windows for this tablet to download. but
> installing it failed. The USB of Windows never loaded. The same USB
> device works fine for Plasma Active and WeTab. I did try WeTab. I
> absolutely hated the layout. I found the WeTab way to limiting, unless
> you want to use console for installing software. The WeTab store was
> just way to small. The WeTab lasted about a day on my tablet. I went and
> installed Plasma Active again. This time, the Live USB image loaded with
> no problems. I was able to bring up YaST>Miscellaneous>Live Installer
> and get through almost all of it with out a USB keyboard.
>
> I have found, for whatever reason, that plasmaboard (which is what the
> name of the default on screen keyboard is), isn’t called for apps at
> root level or for not KDE/QT apps. We are pursuing talks of maliit. I
> also mentioned CellWritter.
>
>
> –
> Jonathan_R
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jonathan_R’s Profile: http://forums.opensuse.org/member.php?userid=170
> View this thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php?t=475422
FYI, AFAIK
You have to use a windows machine to write a windows usb and it must be the
same arch as the iso you are writing (ie; 32 or 64 bit)
I read an article here; Chapter I was able to follow the tips, like xstroke. I have plasmaboard working as the default keyboard (its the default in plasma active anyway), and maliit working for non kde/qt apps. I still havent figured out how to use the on-screen keyboards on root level programs like yast. There are a few minor issues now, but I am working things out. I am writing this using my tablet.