This is a kind of "how to" thing about my Solus Tablet. Thought it might inspire some to do something similar or maybe there might be some ideas on getting more pure tablet functions working smoothly.
Anyhow here goes.
For a while now I have wanted to run a Linux tablet, what I really wanted was to run a tablet with Solus Plasma on it. I had hoped to be able to use a Linx 12x64 to do this but the firmware had limited support under Solus and the Atom processor made heavy work of easy tasks.
Choosing the successor, I wanted to attain these features.
- Must be affordable
- Reasonable CPU (ideally Intel i3 or better)
3, 4GB RAM minimum - Spare parts readily available
- Basic intel graphics
- Detachable keyboard
My final choice was a pre-owned Dell Venue 11 Pro with an Intel i3 gen 4 CPU and 4GB of RAM. The CPU and graphics card was standard laptop hardware so all the basics worked out of the box, battery status, screen rotation, sound and display were all fine. The stock Dell WiFi card does not have satisfactory Linux support so I un-clipped the back cover and replaced it with an Intel dual band wireless AC7260 NGFF M2 card. The original only had an E slot whereas the replacement had A and E slots but came with no compatibility issues. After installing both WiFi and Bluetooth worked on either Windows or Linux.
Solus Plasma installed perfectly using Erase Disc, Enable Swap no hibernate. After reboot I needed a keyboard to enter my password as Solus 4.6 does not support tablets out of the box quite yet. I ran the following commands to install Maliit virtual keyboard and enable the built-in QT Virtual Keyboard to be available at log-on.
sudo eopkg install maliit-keyboard
echo "[General]" | sudo tee -a /etc/sddm.conf
echo "InputMethod=qtvirtualkeyboard" | sudo tee -a /etc/sddm.conf
Trim Service for machines with SSDs isn’t automatically enabled in 4.6 and 4.7 so ran the command sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer to set it up.
Using the Tablet.
Not expecting to do any heavy lifting on this rig for two reasons:-
Older CPU and GPU, not got latest multi-core tech or high resolution ability.
Tablets generally are throttled down to improve thermal and battery performance.
Internet. Web browsing on the default Firefox was fair. Sites loaded and finger scrolled smoothly. Playing (free) online card games was pleasantly responsive and is mostly the limit of my gaming requirements. Video search using Duck Duck Go search engine was quick and everything that I selected seemed to load and play without any performance issues.
Multimedia. The small glass screen displays all colours with a pleasant depth, the default black theme works well.
Haruna Media Player runs movies nicely depending on the compression used. I downloaded Big Buck Bunny at 1080p 60fps which the tablet coped with without issues although the internal fan did start running to keep things cool.
Elisa music and online radio seemed to struggle when playing mp3 with high bit rate so I swapped it out for Audacious which seemed a little lighter on resources.
Bluetooth Music streaming worked nicely. Connection was quick and easy and did not drop out or distort.
Word Processing. Libre Office is still my favourite office suite but offers no support for touch. Looking on the Libre Office website there does not seem to be any support for touchscreens planned for the near future. To be fair serious office work without a proper keyboard would be a very bad idea.
File management. Dolphin has been the best choice for touch that I have found so far. There is a whole world of long press commands for those who have the patience to find them.
Cameras. The tablet features a front and rear facing camera. By modern standards they are fairly low resolution and the tablet is too bulky to be seriously considered for use as a camera so I haven’t spent much time investigating. Camera (Flatpak) application defaults to the selfie camera but I could not find a way to switch to the main one. That was as far as I went as I did not intend to use it in the foreseeable future.
Keyboard. The operating system detects the Dell mobile keyboard by default. Docking and un-docking the keyboard works seamlessly. The keyboard is additionally an add-on battery pack which extends the run time of the tablet.
Run time. Generally Linux has less battery optimisation than Windows so incredibly long run times are not happening here. Despite that 5 hours and up seems to be quite achievable depending on what you are doing. Suspend works well and lengthened the battery life well beyond the 5 hour window. Initial boot time was very quick so I did not worry about setting up any form of hibernate.
Using Plasma, Power Profiles are available, I have set it to Power Save for battery use and Performance when on AC power.
Secure Boot. Solus supports secure boot and it works well on newer machines. I had an issue importing the Machine Owner Key onto the Venue and would recommend leaving Secure Boot turned off in the BIOS on this model.
In conclusion the Dell Venue 11 Pro is a very capable Solus Plasma tablet, suitable for light browsing and online movies, streaming music to a Bluetooth amplifier, eBook reader, video player and light word processing (external keyboard required). Pretty much everything that ships with Solus worked fine on a Wayland session which was my intended platform, Maliit did not work when using X11. I’m sure there is a work around for this but I did not spend time on it.