Linux on a Dell Tablet

⊕ Despite the very low price, it's in remarkably good condition...

⊕ ...although I did replace the back cover. The screen also has some very faint scratches, but it's impossible to tell under normal conditions.

About 6 months ago, I wanted to see how Linux would work on a tablet. I had played around with my old ThinkPad X230t and I was seeing that there was potential for Linux on tablets. In addition to that, I had also learned about the Pinetab, a Linux tablet that is being developed by the Pine64 project. I was really looking forward to that, but I was a little disappointed by the specs. It uses the arm64 architecture (limiting useful apps), and only has a 720p display.

So I was looking around for used tablets that would be possible to install Linux on. Unfortunately, I didn't do a whole lot of research to see which model would be best for Linux. I ended up getting a cheap used Dell Venue 11 Pro 5130, which I only got for about $130 CAD. As a Windows tablet, it was all right. But, for Linux there were a couple things that were troublesome.

However, if you really want a Linux tablet and there are some small issues you don't mind working around, then one of these are pretty good for their price. If you spend a little more to get the 7130 model, they are even better. Faster processor, 64 bit UEFI, more RAM and a replaceable Wi-Fi card makes it a pretty good machine.

⊕

I both love and hate the Atom processor. On the one hand, it has a TDP of 5W! It can last for up to 10 hours if I'm just taking notes. But obviously, this means it's a bit sluggish. With KDE Plasma, it's not too bad, however.

If you're super serious about getting one of these tablets, you should definitely read this first.

Get the keyboard dock, or a USB hub

⊕ I bought this from ebay for $6 CAD. If I had spent just $3 more, it would've came in 2 weeks, instead of 2 months.

Since installing Linux requires a live USB, you will need extra ports if you don't have the keyboard dock. When I first got this, I thought I'd be clever and install grub from Windows (using a program called grub2win) and boot a Linux ISO.

First problem with that, I couldn't figure out how to make a grub menuentry, so I had to manually type the commands to boot the ISO. Second problem, not all Linux distributions can install on a disk with some mounted partitions. Even if the ISO was mounted on a separate partition that had nothing to do with the root file system, some distros just wouldn't want to install (looking at you, Xubuntu)!

Long story short, just get a USB hub, they can be as cheap as $6. It will save you so much trouble.

Wi-Fi isn't really supported

The default atheros card doesn't really work. The drivers are there, but you have to configure them a little. I don't even remember where I got the instructions from anymore since I had to do a lot of research to find it. But, I posted a stackexchange answer so that I could keep it for when I needed it.

With this, the Wi-Fi works as you'd expect, except for one strange issue. Every 30 minutes or so, the Wi-Fi will just disconnect and I have to reload the kernel module. This is a bit of a pain, but I made a script and .desktop file to deal with this. The studioteabag page I linked earlier has an automated python script to reset the kernel modules whenever it detects the wifi dropping. However, I was not able to get it working on my machine.

#/usr/local/bin/netreset

#!/bin/bash
rmmod ath6kl_sdio
rmmod ath6kl_core

modprobe ath6kl_sdio
modprobe ath6kl_core

Miscellaneous

One terrible thing about this tablet is that it has a 32 bit UEFI, which means some distros require a little bit of modification to have them boot properly. Manjaro and Ubuntu is supposed to support this, but I couldn't confirm it to work.

I settled on Fedora because it didn't require any weird fudging to get it to work. I created a bootable USB, and it booted. Manjaro, and KDE Neon didn't have the speakers working out of the box even after I managet to install them. For some reason, speakers were working with Manjaro, but there was an update to alsa which borked them. It was supposedly fixed shortly thereafter, but 4 months later, the speakers still didn't work.

While Fedora has speakers working (which is something I really need), it isn't perfect. If I'm streaming YouTube videos for too long in full screen, it will just freeze completely. I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the kernel since there will occasionally be kernel error notifications when I login. Apart from that, Fedora works fine.

⊕ The stylus works well across many distros. Please excuse my messy handwriting.

One thing that seems to work consistently across all distros, is the stylus support. I've tried live USBs of Fedora, Ubuntu, and Manjaro and it works out of the box. Unfortunately, on Fedora KDE, xournalpp (a notetaking app) doesn't detecte any of the devices. I've tried looking into it, but for now I just ignored it. All it means is that I can only use one tool at a time (it can't differentiate between my finger touch, and the stylus).

If you want a more comprehensive list of what works and what doesn't, this page is awesome for that. It's a slightly different model, but it shares many aspects with mine.

Desktop environment

I was tempted to use GNOME first, since it is very touch friendly (and personally I quite like it). Unfortunately, on the Atom processor GNOME is quite sluggish. While the releases after 3.32 have improved the performance greatly and has reduced the crashes dramatically, it's still not perfect. Apps like xournalpp (a notetaking app), evince, and settings are quite laggy, making everyday usage a little hard.

Instead, I would recommend KDE Plasma. While it is not nearly as touch friendly, it's decent and can be improved pretty easily. By default, touch scrolling is present and it's very responsive and snappy. The cursor doesn't hide on touch usage, but that can easily be fixed with unclutter-xfixes using the --hide-on-touch flag. Simply compile the program and run it at login.

⊕ unclutter --hide-on-touch running at login are absolutely necessary for touchscreen devices.

Next, there is the issue with right clicks on a touch screen. GNOME handles this well; a long press triggers the context menu as you'd expect on just about any touch device. This can be achieved using evdev-rce. This one is a little harder to setup. After compiling, you need to add your user to the right group, or run the command with sudo. I wasn't able to get the former working, so I just configured my user to be able to run that command with sudo without a password prompt:

erik ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/evdev-rce

⊕ qtvirtualkeyboard behaves and looks really good, it's a shame it isn't implemented globally (and yes, that is my password, oh no someone is going to hack me).

Plasma doesn't offer a global onscreen keyboard, so instead onboard is a good substitute. However, I do like qtvirtualkeyboard, which is present in SDDM and the lockscreen, but unfortunately isn't integrated globally. I'm not sure if this is something the devs are working on, but I would imagine that they are.

Autorotate on GNOME is pretty damn good, but as far as I can tell, it's a faf to setup on Plasma. Fortunately, I don't use rotate often, so I just made some bash scripts and a .desktop file to manually rotate whenever I need to. One script is used to rotate the screen as well as the touch and sylus (since that requires some messy and long commands, while the other is just to toggle between portrait and landscape.

The code isn't great, but it gets the job done for a simple job. Yeah, I could consolidate it into one file and assign variables and such so that I don't have to repeat the xinput lines, but it was fast and easy to make so it's not a big deal (this is why I shouldn't be a developer!).

Apps and usability

⊕ Freetube is very much beta software, but it's got some great potential. Freetube plays videos perfectly on this tablet.

Some apps I like to use are kmail for email, xournalpp for notetaking, okular for PDFs, and freetube for watching YouTube. All of these are pretty touch friendly, although okular doesn't have kinetic scrolling implemented, which is a bit of pain, but it's not a big deal. As previously mentioned, xournalpp doesn't work optimally, but it's good enough. Freetube, on the other hand, is still beta software so I'm running into all sorts of bugs. The main developer of the app is rewriting the code, so I won't comment too much on that.

Firefox supports some touch friendliness, but you have to configure it a little to get it working. But it doesn't support smooth zoom natively, which is a little disappointing. So I'd recommend chromium, or ungoogled-chromium (if that's your thing) since it supports touch very well. For everyday web browsing, it is great.

Overall, the tablet is very good for school and multimedia. I'm very pleased with how it works in Linux. I do wish it had a little more RAM and processing power, but I'd have to spend about $80 more for that. As it is, it's decent, and isn't too bad. YouTube videos occasionally stutter in chromium, but freetube works perfectly most of the time. Sometimes it will have issues with fetching the viedo, but it is still beta software, after all.

Seeing that YouTube videos work just fine, I'm not actually too concerned about its performance anymore. While it can be a little laggy, it doesn't freeze often (with the exception of fullscreen YouTube videos).

Conclusion

Should you buy a tablet like this? I think if you're a student in school and you just want a Windows tablet, this is actually a very inexpensive option for something to just take notes on. This tablet strengthens the idea for me that I should have a powerful PC, and a light and small 2 in 1 laptop for school and on the go work. In fact, this tablet with the keyboard dock would be an awesome 2 in 1. However, I already have a small and light wireless keyboard that I use with this tablet.

As for Linux, it's less clear cut. If you're a Linux fan like me who has been using it for over 7 years, by all means, go for it. It's awesome to play around and learn new things trying to troubleshoot and find solutions to make it work. However, if you want a Linux tablet that just works, I'm not so sure if you should get this. While I'd say you should wait for the PineTab, its specs aren't very good and you may have more issues with performance than I do.

⊕ Plasma is actually pretty responsive. Overall, this is a perfectly usable Linux tablet.

I feel like the Pinetab will turn out to be more of a laptop with a touchscreen since. It doesn't even have a good active stylus, so that is something else that really made me go for a used Windows tablet.

Anyways, so that's what I've been doing for the past 6 months with my Dell Venue 11 Pro. Oh, and somehow the Windows 10 installation decided to bork itself, so that's a little funny. I literally just decided to boot into Windows one time, and it "ran into problems" and no matter what I did it wouldn't work. I ended up just single booting Linux on the device. I should've known in advance to keep the product key so I could install Windows 10 on some other device in the future.

Oh well.