[conspire] simultaneous recording and broadcasting of audio; tablet Linux PCs

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt <at> gmail.com> writes:

[snip]
> One of the teachers at the school has just requested a tablet PC for
> use in conjunction with her overhead projector.  I am wondering what
> recommendations people can make with regard to the good, the bad, and
> the ugly of Linux on tablet PCs.  For clarification, please understand
> that the teacher wants to be able to draw directly on a touch-screen
> PC.  She wants to be able to simultaneously project that image onto an
> overhead with a projector.

>From a software perspective, there is no difference between a tablet PC and a PC
with a graphics tablet, so good/bad/ugly stories must include those as well, and
I could share a couple of doozies from the bad/ugly arena. However, I generally
go by "Assume it'll work fine, until it doesn't, and then fix that," and I'd say
she would have a ~95% chance of not running into any problems at all, especially
if Ubuntu's xorg stuff were to be used, since it has come preconfigured for
tablets for several versions now. You have not seen the GIMP in action until you
have tried it with a tablet. I dare say, if a tablet PC is not running
GNU/Linux, it might as well be just a PC. Barring certain video chipset quirks,
expect no problems with the projector, either.

> Also, this same teacher wants to do poetry readings with her students. 
> She wants the students to be able to broadcast their voices to
> speakers, while simultaneously recording the reading for later editing
> and remixing.

This will inevitably obviate a non-computer-related problem: Any such recording
will have picked up not only their voices, but also the speaker-broadcast
versions of their voices simultaneously. If you can find a way around that,
there is literally no end to the list of possible software solutions.