Thinking about Elive on a tablet

Elive System Installed
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4

note that both "touch feautres" and "dpi" things are not very compatible with E16, even if Elive improves it a bit, the best is to switch to E25+, you can try to experiment with this desktop because it has more (and more special) touch features just like a more dynamic dpi system, as we mentioned in other threads is not worth to try implementing better these things in e16 because is more limited to manage these things and is better to put our efforts on E25 which seems everytime more stable and mature.

In fact, if you play with E25 for that you can create a howto about the changes required / suggested for make it more tablet-friendly (there's some settings, virtual keyboards as you said, and even emodules (illume?) that could be loaded for a better handling of that), and we will integrate all them better in the future releases of elive :slight_smile:

About the virtual keyboard, Elive had some features for enable automatically a virtual keyboard on login when the computer doesn't has found any, the piece of code is this one:

    if ! cat /proc/bus/input/devices | grep -qsi "keyboard" ; then
        if ! lsusb | grep -qsi "keyboard" ; then
            if ! dmesg | grep -qsi "keyboard" ; then
                if ! hwinfo --keyboard | grep -qsi "keyboard" ; then
                        # mark that this computer doesn't has a keyboard:
                        echo "keyboard: not found" >> /etc/elive-version
                fi
            fi
        fi
    fi

So basically, try to run these commands as root to see if reaches the step to add this mark on the /etc/elive-version file, if so, elive should always give you a virtual keyboard on desktop login by default (and should include it on lightdm login too)

  1. TODO for E25+, experimenting required :slight_smile:
    1.1 are you suggesting to move cairo-dock in a side when tablet-mode is found? :thinking: this can be easy to integrate when the previous piece of code marks the "keyboard: not found" on a machine
  2. can you confirm the mentioned "auto show virtual keyboard when no keyboard is found" works on your machine, since you have a tablet? also..:
    2.1 auto-show when connect/disconnect will require a dbus / udev entry, this is possible but i think you are the best one to betatest this implementation :slight_smile:
    2.2 lock-screen: i dont think a virtualkeyboard is possible to show on it, or maybe we need a different lock-screen feature (e25+ could have this working by default)
    2.3 lightdm login: virtual-keyboard automatically enabled should work as the previous code explained, but i need you to confirm me that it works or then i should fix / improve the code
  3. we need to know the "xev" detected events to add the e16 bindings for them, if there's not, maybe they are detected via ACPI (on which you can found more answers on google about the trigger of these hardware keys)
    3.1 then, we will need to create a script (or use an existing one) for auto detect and rotate, when this key is pressed
  4. note that there's already different hotkeys for the same purposes enabled in e16 bindings (to maintain some compatibility and user friendly from other OSes known hotkeys), check if other ones satisfy the need (and they should be mentioned on the details of the hotkeys pdf i think), suggestions for improve this on tablet are welcome (what you mean by hardware buttons? note that every tablet has different hardware buttons so this cannot be compatible among different hardwares, unless the "xev" key is a known XF86something one which is a generically-known key)
  5. I think it will only work on e25+ (note that chrome makes it working by default)
  6. review:
    6.1 xournal: betatested,
    6.2: mypaint: already included in the beta's since it doesn't conflict with gimp on bullseye :slight_smile:
    6.3: calibre: included
    6.4: evince: included
    6.5: movie player: included
    6.6: extra: there's also "kodi" and other applications included that are touch friendly

yes because there's tablet-computers that are sell in the market, they need to ship with an operating system, since windows is the one picked for the majority of computers today (and they must be fully functional) they spend money/development on integrating a good tablet integration on them, if their choice would have been linux, same thing would have been happened, so the fault is from the manufacturer's choice (and microsoft extorsion :speak_no_evil: )

Note: This sounds more like a "roadmap" project, so could be good to follow specific "tasks" for its better integration, for now the most important one is to check if "tablet device" is detected correctly with the "keyboard: not found" entry (which this simple entry should mean "we are a touch device")

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