07 january 2026
Wednesday. The first week of 2026 is passed. I spent yesterday and today messing around with a Panasonic Toughpad I got on Ebay. It's in mostly working order, although the speakers seem to do nothing (headphone port works fine). I'd started out with Gnome on Debian, but the touchscreen frequently stopped working until I plugged in a keyboard to wake it back up. I then tried Plasma, but I couldn't get the onscreen keyboard to work except on the login screen. The more I tried to fix it, the worse things got. So I gave up on Deb and installed Ubuntu (Debian would have been fine if it had a real keyboard attached all the time...might eventually do that). Ubuntu has an onscreen keyboard that actually shows up when it's needed. Unfortunately it's not a complete keyboard. There are no function keys, no Esc, no Winkey, and sometimes no arrows or modifier keys. I have no idea how to fix this. Pressing the "configure keyboard" button just takes you to the generic keyboard settings where you can set the kbd language. Nothing about the display. So it's mostly working now. I shut it off, and I'm back on the desktop with a proper keyboard, mouse, and large screen. Tommorow or Friday I should be getting some RAM for the m1400 tablet, so I'll move back to messing with that one soon.