After reading several blogs and they all seem to have the same gist. Its very hard to get linux working on a tc1000.
"Back to Windows XP
I finally decided that a slower, non-free OS with decent applications and a little better look-and-feel and much more functionality would be worth going back to, and reinstalled Windows XP Professional Tablet Edition. However, that process wasn’t seamless either. I had an external USB CD-ROM drive, and popped in the CD. It wouldn’t boot. I checked the BIOS boot order, and there was no CD-ROM drive listed. How odd! My BIOS was up-to-date.
After brainstorming for several days, I was able to enlist a friend with a Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS) server to help me reinstall a working OS. I used a USB flash drive to copy over the drivers so that I could get network connectivity again. And I installed Firefox, Putty, and all of my favorite Windows open source utilities. If I am going to use Windows XP Professional Tablet Edition, at least I’ll have some useful applications on it!"
Linux may not be the best or even a much faster option for this hdw. Oh well.
Thought I’d post my experiences on getting OpenSUSE working on the TC1000. After going through these steps, I got the Tablet to boot, screen adjusted to right resolution and pen working. I still need to get audio working and get Nvidia accelerated drivers running.
Download network installation CD for 11.1. The Live CD would not boot for me and I didn’t want to burn an install DVD.
Most of the steps presented during install are self explanatory. I choose to install XFCE as the desktop as it is lighter that GNOME/KDE. Later on I will install LXDE as I find it lighter that XFCE (it is not an option during install).
When the installation lists all the steps before starting to load stuff to your tablet, you have the option of clicking on the software section and adding/removing apps. Add the Tablet PC support here.
After install and booting for the first time, you’ll need to adjust the screen resolution. Enter Yast and select the hardware section. By default, it is set to 800x600, but doesn’t quite use the whole screen. You have to add a higher resolution by clicking on “change” for the video card then click on 1024x768, 60Hz. Don’t exit yet, as you need to activate the pen next.
You’ll also be able to activate the pen in this area as well. Follow the steps in TabletPCs - openSUSE.
Now you can save your changes, which will prompt you to test the video resolution. A screen adjustment tool will come up with a test border. Hit save if everything looks right. The tablet may crash here, but just restart and everything should work.
If everything went well, you’ll have a working tablet with the pen active. As I get the other stuff working I’ll add it here.
OK, on that tablet pc the os is embedded and on that model i do believe you have to disable speed stepping in the setup screen i ran into this problem for a customer who was running vista and wanted to dual boot into suse 11.1 when i disabled the speed stepping i was able to run the live cd and then i loaded 11.1 and it set-up just fine .
after investing two full days (nights included) of my holidays into getting a Linux distribution with tablet support running on my TC1000, I landed here. Almost stranded as some others have.
I had tried Ubuntu 9.04 which installed without any problems. However, pen support was not clear to me, so I abandoned that distro. Had a look into Arch Linux but could not get it to install. The installation process ended in a Kernel panic no matter what I tried.
I recalled that openSUSE has good support for Tablet PCs. So I tried to install 11.1 by all possible and impossible means. The install from USB-iso via Unetbootin did not work, neither did the installation from external CD drive.
(BTW, since I did not want to buy the docking station just for trying to install from CD, I tried to attach an old CD drive from a desktop computer via a USB to IDE adapter. Much to my surprise it worked perfectly well!)
As a last resource I tried the network install which was the only one to really boot from the CD. I did manage to get through the selection of the repos but apparently no repos were really recognized. After much searching it turned out that the network interfaces did not get set up properly. I could not get them working neither by DHCP nor by manual configuration, no idea why!
Right before giving up, I found out how to cirumvent the external repos. So here is a little howto for getting openSUSE installed on the TC1000:
Download the DVD installer (4.2 GB!) and extract its content onto the root of a separate partition on your TC1000’s hard-drive. (So don’t place the files in any folder but put them right under whatever directory the partition is mounted.) Note the partition name (like /dev/sad6).
Boot the TC1000 with the network installation CD. Use the local hard-drive as repository.
I was inspired by palvarez09’s comment above. In my case I had some concerns about space since I run my system from a 16GB SSD so the 4+ GB of the DVD were a heavy burden. Though the system fit very well. For reasons of performance, I use the XFCE display manager.
After the installation, I did activate the tablet by using Sax2. However the tab for the pen settings remained inaccessible. No idea why. However, the pen is fully functional.
Trying to install the proprietary legacy NVidia drivers resulted in a complete crash. (As on Ubuntu.) I believe this is due to a strange interplay of processor type, kernel version and NVidia driver. The bottom line is that the more recent kernels don’t work with the more recent NVidia drivers on the Transmeta Crusoe. (Still I shall give it some more trial and error, the night is only at its half …)