Ubuntu Mate on a tablet (HP tc4400)?

Support & Help Requests Hardware
#1

Hi,

I have been using Ubuntu Mate for a while on an old Pentium 4 box and I love it. I will be putting a Linux Distro on a HP tc4400 tablet/laptop soon, and would love to put on Ubuntu Mate. I searched but did not find anything about doing so in this forum.

Ubuntu (along with OpenSUSE and Fedora) seems to be one of the most common distros for such tablets with most of the pen control stuff working out of the box. I am wondering if this would be a similar experience with Ubuntu Mate (which I prefer) or if anyone has experience using U.M. on similar hardware?

This is not an android type tablet, it is currently running Windows XP, and has a Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz processor, 4 Gb Ram so it meets system requirements, just not sure about support for Wacom tablet features. There was one post about difficulties with a Wacom cintiq 24HD but that is a somewhat different system and the thread was unresolved.

I can always give it a shot, but I expect the live install on any of these Distros may not be a good indicator, so if anyone has any experience I would love to hear about it.

Thanks,
Chris

#2

@ChrisVT are you still working on this? I'm currently running Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS on my HP tc4400. Some things don't work, but the wacom stylus does work out of the box. It won't rotate with the screen unless you change the settings with a bash script or manually (in the terminal), and none of the soft buttons work. They are recognized as hardware, but I haven't been able to get them working. I found an old article in the Ubuntu forums that someone patched the driver back in Ubuntu 10.10, but it was a manual patch for you to install that would get them working again.
The keyboard also has issues. Then I close the lid with the screen up (tablet mode) the keyboard is disconnected. That's all well and dandy. When I open it back up, it stays disconnected and now I cannot enter my password, so I have to restart the computer.
I also think that I need to test the keys on the keyboard to ensure that they are all doing what they are supposed to do. Some of it may be software settings, though.

#3

Hi, My tc4400 started getting kind of flakey and was having a number of hardware issues so I retired it a few months ago. I never got around to running MATE but did run a number of distros including Mint, Manjaro and they ran pretty well.
I did not experience the issue you describe with losing the keyboard when transitioning to/from tablet mode. Good luck.
Chris