breathing new life into an old tablet

i have an old 8 inch windows 8 tablet. it's really basic, and i never really used it much to begin with. i realized this is a good size to read pdfs and open library content, which i've been doing a lot lately. all of my other devices are either too big to take somewhere comfortable, or too small to read the pages. so after pulling it out of a dusty box in a closet i decided to play around with it.

turns out i played with it at some point in the past, because i had it dual booted with windows 8 and bliss os. i also noticed that the plastic had a bunch of scratches on it, with tape covering the camera. i remember this. for some reason, the material on the back deteriorated and got all sticky, so i scraped it all off with sandpaper and planned to repaint it, but never got to the repainting part.

anyway, bliss is cool, but i was having technical issues with it, probably why i threw this thing into a closet and forgot about it. with the end of windows 8 support, and bliss acting weird, i decided to wipe the thing completely with a new operating system.

but what os? i recently dual booted my laptop with linux mint and was refamiliarizing myself with linux, so i decided i wanted to use a tablet friendly version of linux. immediately ubuntu came to mind. maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but i really like the unity desktop environment.

so now the question is how do i actually install ubuntu? this tablet has a single usb port, an sd card slot, mini hdmi (lolwut?), a headphone jack (hard to come by these days!), and a micro-usb slot for charging. whatever i do, i need some kind of bootable media and a physical keyboard attached.

by pure chance, i just so happen to own a couple micro-usb to usb dongles that i got with some other device (i don't remember lol). and to my surprise, this micro-usb slot works for more than just charging. this way i was able to plug in a keyboard and the flash drive into it at the same time.

ok! that's all well and good, but now i was having trouble getting it to boot from the drive. my flash drives are kind of old, so i worried that maybe they were dying. 

but, thankfully, it actually turned out that this tablet is only 32 bits, and i was using 64 bit isos. but this presented a new problem; i had a hell of a time trying to find a 32 bit version of linux that i wanted to use. it seems like all of my go-to linux distros don't support 32 bit anymore. 

so i had to venture out and ended up going with debian since modern gnome works decently well on touch screen devices. that and all the linux distros i use are debian-based, but i've never used debian proper before. how hard could it be?

i attach all the things to my frankenstein monster; a flash dive in the usb port and a keyboard in the micro-usb slot. it boots, and we're installing. and as that's going along taking it's time. i realize my tablet isn't plugged in! it was working fine now, but i had no idea how good this battery was, and the installation was taking its sweet time and the tablet was getting hot! the clock was ticking.

so as if things weren't janky enough, i start alternating between charging in the micro-usb and using my keyboard, and the installation went without a hitch. if it works it works!

sure enough, debian loads and i'm in there. it's been years since i've used gnome, it was a little overwhelming, but intuitive enough. however, i was getting a bunch of little issues. the tablet wouldn't sleep, it would just turn back on. autorotate was completely broken, it would rotate once and never rotate again. and worst of all, the on screen keyboard wasn't ever popping up! i tried setting it up in the accessibility options, but to no avail, it just refused to show. without the on screen keyboard this thing is completely unusable!

i tabled the project (tabbled, perhaps) for a couple days at this point, thinking it was a failure. later i decided it was debian that was the culprit. so i look around for other linux distros. i create a bootable drive for opensuse as a hail mary pass and get to work.

it just wouldn't boot, even though i had a 32bit iso. but after some tinkering i finally get a bootable drive to work. but then the installer crashes before it even loads! i can't even get opensuse installed on this thing. what do i do now? i can try to fix debian, or keep looking for distros until one of them works.

i decided to just work within debian. but maybe i didn't even have to. after a few updates and restarts everything just started to work! the keyboard, the sleep issue, almost everything. i only had to tinker with a handful of settings. i was way too quick to call it a failure.

the only weird thing is the display settings think that landscape is vertical and portrait is horizontal, and the device's auto rotate doesn't seem to work. so i just set it into landscape (actually portrait) and don't plan to rotate very often. if i do, i can just go to settings easy enough.

also the sleep issue isn't completely resolved, i'll have to look into it. it will turn back on briefly for no apparent reason, but it happens much less, and turns back off on it's own eventually. it might just be some notifications setting or something.

and the keyboard issue, while mostly resolved, is still acting weird in firefox. but i can swipe up to bring in the keyboard, so it's still usable. i feel like this one can be fixed, so i'll look into it too.

as for the sandpaper marks.. i think i'm just going to get a cheap 8 inch universal case and pretend it's not ugly as sin in back. maybe one day i'll repaint it, but that'll be a little bit of work, and i don't have any appropriate paint (or money, lol) right now.