I’m starting a new project. What is JORSnix, you ask? It’s Linux for Tablet PCs. Windows has the monopoly on Tablet PCs, and that sucks, because besides that, Linux is wonderful for students. And so are tablets.

For those of you who don’t follow my blog, I own a Lenovo X61 Tablet. It’s my pride and joy, and I take it everywhere. It weighs under four pounds, has excellent battery life (or.. well.. used to..), and of course it’s also a tablet, so I can take notes in class on it.

So what is JORSnix going to be? It’s going to be based on Ubuntu, and loosely modelled around their release schedule. If they do something that screws up tablet support for a release, we’ll notify our users and skip it.

In short: we’re going to make it easy for you to use your tablet efficiently with Linux. That’s the goal, anyway.

We plan on packaging a lightweight system with Gnome (maybe one of the *box WMs later), Xournal, CellWriter, EasyStroke, and wacom-tools. We’ll make all of the buttons work and make your laptop usable in Tablet Mode without a keyboard.

But for now, we’re just going to support Lenovo X61 Tablets because that’s all we have, but hopefully it will work on other tablets with little tweaking. Both HP and Fujitsu use similar Wacom backends, so if I don’t do anything too Lenovo-specific, it’ll be OK. Anyway. This is the birth of something good. If you read this and you’re willing to test, especially if you have a different tablet than me, please, please contact me.