I've been enjoying my 'new' (It's actually a bit old, being based in the original AMD Brazos platform, z01 CPU, but still, dual-core and updated to 8GB RAM, purchased late 2012 and only having had time to play with it now)....<br>
<br>The good news: Fedora boots fine and runs smoothly, BUT!...<br><br>1. The Gnome 3.x "hitting the top-left corner" system works and seems designed with a mouse in mind, NOT touch. If I touch with the finger in the upper left corner of the screen, 99.1% of the time (rough estimate ;) .... NOTHING HAPPENS. That surely is because the "focus point"of the "hit" is too narrow for a finger. In other words, it's expecting the mouse pointer to be at 0x0 (or 1x1) pixel coordinate for a splt second before invoking the gnome screens. With a finger hit, surely one fat finger translates to coordinates 0-40 x to 0-40y.<br>
<br>It doesn't matter if I just position the finger in the corner, or if I try to emulate the mouse action of doing a small travel with the finger and "hitting" the corner. It only works on about 1 in every 20 tries.<br>
<br>So, how to fix this? how to make the "invocation area" bigger?<br><br>2. The unit comes with 3 sensor keys (virtual buttons drawn over the right edge of the touch screen), that provide the following functions:<br>
<br>a. O-Easy (on Windows, this calls a custom MSI app that allows you to, among other things, easy one-touch enable-disable of several tablet components, ie WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, cameras, etc). Before OS loads, "O-easy" is mapped in the BIOS to the ENTER key, which together with the volume up/down buttons on the side (mapped to cursor up/down) allow navigating the Win7 boot menus without a keyboard and before the OS loads.<br>
<br>b. Home (used to minimize everything and get a look at the desktop, pressd again, maximized apps return)<br><br>c. Hang. This simulates a Ctrl-Alt-Del. Used with win7, it's very handy to invoke the Win7 task manager when a misbehaving app needs to be killed.<br>
<br>Well, on Fedora 'virtual keys' (a) and (b) do nothing, but (c) is the worrying one as it sends Fedora on the awful standard Ctrl-Alt-Del "system is shutting down in 60 secs..." dialog unles you cancel it.<br>
<br>I've been reading complaints about this default Ctrl-Alt-Del behaviour in Linux since at least 2005... Isn't it time to change the dialog that AT LEAST lets the user choose between many options, one of them being "shutdown/reboot and another Start Task Manager?". It would be a great step forward on the usability angle, specially for people coming from Windows.<br>
<br>(and not to mention on this table when you can simply invoke a shumtdown if you're not paying much attention and tap into the Hang virtual button with the corner of your hand while grabbing the tablet...<br><br>ANY IDEAS of how to fix/improve any of the points raised above is of course welcome.<br>
<br>The good:<br><br>1. I can do everything I used to do with a netbook, with a tablet.<br><br>2. I can run Virtualbox!. Try VBox on a ARM/Android based *TOY*<br><br>Final question: is F18/F19 SSD aware, or is there any manual tweak I must take into account? (wrt flash device life, filesystem used (ext2 to minimize writes, perhaps?)<br>
<br>FC<br><br clear="all">PS: Tablet is a MSI WIndpad 110W, AMD Brazos z01. Still available in Canada* (it was also in Amazon.com until December '12, that's when I bought it, as it was the only non-Intel, x86 tablet that provided the best price/performance -$450-550 and expandability -up to 8GB ram unlike its only competitor at the time the Acer Iconia Tab W500).<br>
* <a href="http://www.shopbot.ca/pp-msi-windpad-110w-msi-price-325350.html">http://www.shopbot.ca/pp-msi-windpad-110w-msi-price-325350.html</a><br><br>-- <br>During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act<br>
- George Orwell<br>