Finally got "a round tuit" and updated the LE1700 to opensuse 11.4. Same deal here as with opensuse 1.3, it installed "like buttah". Wacom support was surprisingly available early in the install, so the pen was usable instead of the mouse to navigate the installation dialogs.

Xstroke, cellwriter, and yudit (yudit includes something called freehand) were available from the packages for installation. There are several virtual keyboards, too.

I'm half-lazy. I'd prefer a magical AI process that psychically divines the intent of continuous scribbling. Then again, if I can't read half of what I wrote it's unrealistic to expect a computer to do it. So, I'll tolerate the extra time needed for writing incurred by character-by character interpreters as long as the stroke patterns makes sense. Having used several other systems with stroke entry software I've found these things are often exercising in delivering annoyance by forcing users to write letters precisely a certain way. That's pretty much what killed my use of those platforms and where my laziness kicks in -- I'm not going to spend a lot of time retraining myself to remember to write text in nonsensical ways just to fit some other lazier programmer's view of text entry.

Disclaimer: I only spent a couple hours working on this. (Hey, I said I was lazy.) So, over time results should get better.

XStroke didn't work out too well for me. It is supposed to be trainable, but on startup there was only an icon to turn stroke recognition on and off. I didn't look hard, but didn't see anything else obvious to do the training. I'll try again later sometime. So, out of the box many of the Xstroke default patterns don't make sense to me, so character recognition was about 60% and there were a few characters I just couldn't figure out. I do like that is allows writing directly anywhere on the screen, not in a specific input window, so when I can do the training it should work out well.

CellWriter accepts input in specific squares inside a window. One of the nice things about cell writer is that on startup it recognized it had not been trained and forced me to train it. After that it did about 95% in recognition. After fixing a few ambiguous and sloppily trained letters it then ran through the entire alphabet, upper and lower, and numbers without mistakes. Most cool.

I'll assume for now it is my fault xstroke doesn't work well, since I hadn't trained it. The operational difference between the two is that Xstroke characters are typed directly into the active app as they are written. CellWriter accepts input into a grid of boxes in its own input window and the collected text is delivered all at once to the application when the send button is clicked. There's pro and con about both methods. On one hand XStroke's full-screen input method is faster, but in the event of mistakes it can take longer to edit especially when it means going to a virtual keyboard in order to move a cursor around and delete/backspace of characters. In Cellwriter the input is a little slower, since it has to be put neatly into little cells, however, correcting mistakes is only a matter of writing over the errant cell again until the proper letter appears.

I did not have time to play with Yudit's handwriting recognition. There is also a program called Penreader not included in the openSuse install packages which I'll have to hunt down and install later.

As far as OnNote goes, I don't use it much myself, so I'm not sure what qualifies as a good replacement. According to others depending on what you do with OneNote there are lots of possibilities mentioned on several other sites: Jarnal, TheNoteTakingTool, FreeMind, Compendium, Freeplane, Xmind, Vue, Zim, TiddlyWiki, BasketNotes, Newton, Tomboy, Keynote, and WikiPad. Given the number I found, there are probably a lot more, too.