[obsolete] Penpower Chinese Expert with Aspire ONE 751h

[funkster1]

Hi there,
I'm prepping above cited netbook for a friend of mine. I installed PCLinuxOS LXDE, all hardware seems to be recognised no problem (Intel Atom Z520, 1.33 Ghz/Hyperthreading/2 GB RAM/ Poulsbo GFX/320 GB WD Black Scorpio/11.8" screen with 1366x768px/Atheros 5xxx WLAN/Realtek LAN/etc.) and the LXDE desktop is working nicely with that low spec machine.
Since she's from Hong-Kong, she needs chinese input method at least for the web, which is catered for by the "Fireinput" Firefox Addon and a Windows Word processor for chinese ("NJStar Chinese WP Free," wich works great under WINE).
But then she's been using under WinXP a Pen Input Device to enter chinese symbols, highlight them and get a popup for translation, grammar, proper pronounciation and other useful stuff (her chinese is not that well, having grown up in germany mainly).
The device description can be found here: http://pce.penpowerinc.com/pce_writingpad.html.

Does anybody here have experience with this kind of input device, or would anybody know how to make such things work under GNU/linux (PCLinuxOS in particular)? It sure looks like a very basic WACOM kind of tablet to me. Has anybody experience with handwriting recognition software/devices under *nix and could recommend a software package for such duties?
If you need some "lsusb -v" info about the device or any other, let me know.

I know that this might be a very special request for help/advice, but I'd be really eternally grateful if someone could push me into some direction.

TIA and best regards,

Raphael

[T6]

that machine seems to be a atom dualcore, you can put kde4 in it without problems, i have a n455 and works perfectly

i hope i'm wrong but this kind of devices are more software than hardware, it is probably only a app doing everything and the device just acts as a storage device

for this i would set the machine to doualboot with xp, it is perfectly capable of doing it

[funkster1]

Hello Super Villain (quel nom ),

thanks for your input. The Atom Z520 is a Single Core with Hyperthreading.
About KDE, I don't want it. I find LXDE a very nice desktop. Not as advanced or full featured as GNOME (my personal preference together with XFCE) or KDE, but still fully functional and quite lightweight.
The device is an input device for handwriting, not any sort of output device. You're right that it's mainly the software that is doing all the magic here, at least under Windows.
I'd install her a WinXP version for dual booting, problem is that she hasn't noted the Windows serial number from the device and the sticker which is under the netbook is since the time of using it unreadable (moving the netbook around on the table and such, scratched the sticker). The old HDD has just crashed, so I exchanged it for a bigger, faster one. But with the nuked HDD, the recovery partition is also gone. Otherwise I would have had a possibility to recover the Windows serial. Since she came to me much too late asking for help, it's gone. Although she isn't really bothered by the fact of now using Linux instead. Which is nice .
If the device can't be made to work under *nix, it's not dramatic, since she still has a family notebook at home which runs Windows and where the device works. It just would have been nice to get it to run under *nix.

Anyway, still looking for a software package that can recognise/manage handwriting (if only for informational purposes for myself).

Thanks for your input.

Raphael

 

[Aradalf]

You could try running the software under Wine? 

[funkster1]

Well, maybe. Since on the website it's noted that under Mac OSX i.e. you'd need to run it in a VM, I'm not that confident.
But like I said, it's not dramatic if it doesn't work since my friend still has another notebook which is used by the whole family
which runs W7. The main stuff (Sogou Pinyin & NJStar Chinese WP) works on the netbook.

I've looked in synaptic and saw that PCLOS does provide/support quite a bunch of input devices like Pens & Tablets.
So just for my own curiosity I'd be interested to know how to make them work. I'll probably have to look a little deeper in the
X11 manual/documentation/Wiki. I once had an Aiptek GFX Tablet which worked mostly OOTB back then, so there surely IS a way
to manage such things. Just a question of time spent for the benefit expected. 

Thanks for your input,

Raphael