Brian's Blog

I've had this TC4200 running Kubuntu Linux for a fair bit of time. I've used it off and on for various things but never took the time to get all the tablet functions working close to as they would in Windows. Unfortunately it seems that much of the tablet specific technology that handles handwriting is proprietary, thus leaving Linux out. After some searching with little results I accidentally stumbled upon Cellwriter when I was just about to give up. I checked the apt repositories to find it isn't there. However, there is a deb package for Debian downloadable from their website along with the source. This deb installed just fine in Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy).

Previously I was using xkbd, which was sufficient but was only an on screen keyboard. Cellwriter is both an on screen keyboard and handwriting recognition utility. It did take some training to get it to work half decent. Basically it was about 10 minutes of writing each letter and common symbol 4 or 5 times to give it an idea of what your writing is like. After this it was fairly accurate. By default it tunes itself when you correct it's mistakes. Pretty slick.

If this interests you I'd just go to their site and see what they have to say about it. No sense in me repeated it over again here. But so far I'm pleased with its performance.