I received a kind donation from a member of the Destination Linux Community, Bill, which has become a fantastic addition to my ensemble of machines doing various jobs, daily. This machine is a Fujitsu Lifebook T725 that was manufactured on or about 2015 based on the documentation available. The BIOS release date on my particular machine is: 08 May 2015. Although I have and continue to use touch screen computers with Plasma, this was a different machine that had the capability of filling that tablet roll as well as a laptop.
There are several features that makes this a compelling machine. Firstly, it has this ability to be a laptop or a tablet. The screen will rotate in either direction with stops as to prevent you from destroying the data transmission cables within the pivot point. The machine is fairly small and has great battery life. It is not a power house for graphics capabilities for but for any sort of office roll or ultra-casual gaming, this computer will do just fine. This machine has been performing its roll fantastically well as the computer my kids use for school work and as it sits today, there haven’t been any activities that taxed this machine.
Here I evaluate, how well does it openSUSE and what kind of experience I have with it in video form.
Odysee
Specifications
Here is a list of some of this machines specifications.
CPU
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5200U CPU @ 2.20GHz
GPU
Mesa Intel HD Graphics 5500
RAM
One DIMM slot. System memory is upgradable to 12 GB (Fixed 4 GB + 8 GB) of total memory. DDR3-1600 MHz SDRAM dual-channel memory module
Storage
480 GB SSD (with this particular machine)
Optical Drive
Ports
- 3x USB-3
- HDMI
- SVGA
- 3.5mm Headphone
- 3.5mm Microphone
- SD Card reader
- Kensington Lock
- Ethernet
- Dock station port
Touchpad
Multi Touch with two separate physical buttons
Screen
The Internal screen resolution: 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, 16M colors
Final Thoughts
Overall I give this computer 4 out of 5 Geekos on running openSUSE Tumbleweed. There is not so much of an issue with openSUSE itself but the capabilities baked into Plasma in handling the touch screen interface. The handling of rotating the screen causes the input digitizer to not be synchronized with the screen and the lack of onscreen keyboard as a part of Plasma that works with the login screen but isn’t available within the Desktop environment itself. If it could be exposed while using the desktop as you would expect on a smartphone, this would change the experience of Plasma on the Tablet mode from okay to absolutely fantastic.
As it stands today, it makes for a great touch screen laptop that is okay in tablet mode. This is a fantastic little computer that works smashingly as a general desktop computing device. I am hoping for many years of active service from this machine but of course, that is heavily dependent on how well I can ensure the kids care for it.
References
https://www.fujitsu.com/sg/products/computing/pc/ap/tablets/tseries/t725/
http://get.opensuse.org
Dell Inspiron 20 3048 All-In-One Desktop
Does the xinput “Coordinate Transformation Matrix” param let you rotate the touch screen on this tablet (e.g. to match the screen when you’ve rotated the screen)?
When I ran into the same thing in lxqt on a bay trail tablet, it did, so I set up a little background python script to watch for the rotation changes on dbus and change the param: https://gist.github.com/rakslice/fcc62babb7a7062328e3899decc7ef24 (see the comment at the bottom of the gist for more info)
it’s a different distro, desktop env, on different hardware so ymmv, but could be a starting point for putting something together