> From: sajolida <sajolida@???>
>
> Peter N. Glaskowsky:
>> Internal SSDs like the typical eMMC devices found in cheap x86
>> tablets are very nearly indistinguishable from SD cards; the major
>> difference in functionality is that you lose the ability to yank the
>> drive to trigger a shutdown and memory wipe, and compensating for
>> this probably requires UI alternatives for keyboard and touchscreen.
>
> Did you investigate whether GNOME is already working on supporting
> touchscreen and touchscreen keyboard?
Tails itself already provides some support for both, presumably just by pass-through from Gnome. But there are limitations; for example, Tails doesn’t seem to provide a way to turn on the virtual keyboard for entering the administrator and persistence passwords, so getting those things done means connecting a USB keyboard (or a keyboard that uses a proprietary USB wireless dongle, since those look like USB keyboards to the system).
Here’s the Gnome status page for touch support:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Touchscreen
Gnome’s page about the on-screen keyboard feature says this feature is “absolutely imperative” to create a good experience on touchscreen devices:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/ScreenKeyboard
>> But since tablets usually have very few options for storage
>> expansion, if someone is going to dedicate a machine to Tails, it’ll
>> be much more convenient to put the OS on the internal drive, allowing
>> removable storage to be used normally.
>
> I could agree with that. The thing is that we surely don't want to
> remove for *any* device the software protection that we have. So maybe
> we'd have to add exceptions for tablets.
>
> When you say that they have very few options for storage expansion, how
> often do they have a SD card slot for example?
Most Windows tablets seem to have SD card slots, most commonly for the MicroSD card form factor. They all have USB sockets (a Windows requirement), but they tend to have just one of them.
>>> Peter was mentioning x86 tablets. So Peter, if you want to
>>> investigate cheap x86 tablets and report which ones are able to run
>>> Tails or what is missing for that to work it would be great! As a
>>> first step towards having Tails on handheld devices.
>>
>> Yes, I’m working on this already. I have a variety of x86 Windows
>> tablets already (all traditional PC-style systems inside, so they all
>> seem to run Tails normally, modulo the predictable limitations of
>> touchscreen devices)
>
> Do you mean that you already started Tails on one of those tablets?
> which brands and models?
Yes, three models, all designed to what Microsoft used to call the Tablet PC standard— basically, these are all designed to the same standards as Windows laptops, but without the permanently attached keyboard and generally with fewer connectors. They all worked normally within those limitations:
HP Slate 500
Samsung Series 7 Slate
Microsoft Surface Pro (original model)
Of these, the Samsung was probably the best experience. The HP Slate 500 is painfully slow with relatively low screen resolution. While the Surface Pro is very fast and has a decent snap-on keyboard with touchpad, the screen resolution is too high for convenient use; it’s very difficult to select some of Tails' smaller UI elements with the touchpad or stylus.
All of these machines support both touch and stylus. I don’t own and haven’t tried any touch-only Windows tablets.
There are many reports online of people finding it difficult to use any kind of Linux on low-cost Windows tablets like the HP Stream 7, Dell Venue 8 Pro, or similar units from Nextbook, Asus, Toshiba, etc. Many of these machines won’t even boot from USB without making changes in the BIOS (disabling Secure Boot, for example) or creating special bootable images with 32-bit UEFI. A few of them have only a micro-USB port, so they would need an OTG-to-A adapter or a dual USB/OTG thumb drive. And even for machines that DO have a type A USB port, there’s never more than one, and that means a USB hub is needed to boot from USB with a USB keyboard connected.
I think a low-cost x86 tablet with Tails permanently installed on the internal SSD would be nice to have, and it shouldn’t take much work to make it happen for at least some existing tablets:
1) Enable installation to any drive (with suitable warnings)
2) Have the Greeter recognize the absence of a keyboard and activate the on-screen keyboard
3) Increase the size of UI elements where needed so they can be selected using touch
And even step 3 isn’t strictly necessary on stylus-equipped machines as long as the screen resolution isn’t too high.
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