Free Like GNU

I must say that Ubuntu 8.10 is really shining on my tablet.  I made a live USB stick of 8.10 with the slick usb-creator app (works from 8.04 too) and booted up with correct resolution (1280×800), perfectly working wireless (intel4965agn adapter) that could connect with my university TTLS/PAP wifi network.  Even the SDHC card reaader is working with my 16GB card! Suspend also worked flawlessly and faster as well (2 or 3 seconds instead of 4 or 5).  Wireless comes back quickly too.  In Hardy I had to wait about 10 seconds before wireless came back online, now it reconnects almost instantly.

The only major snag was having to manually futz with the xorg.conf to get my tablet to work.  Once configured, I played with GIMP, recently updated to 2.6!  GIMP is much improved for tablet support and has some nice options for changing brushstokes with not only pen pressure, but also velocity!  This is as close to painting on a real surface that I’ve seen in any non-custom paint program.

GNOME desktop configuration is much tighter with the Appearance preferences.  The new, darker, human theme is great for those who work in the late hours with lights low or in dimly lit cafes.  I eventually switched back to XFCE for desktop, because of fast rock solid panels (GNOME panels are still relatively sluggish, even with animation turned off and low delay settings).  GNOME does have a very nice way of altering the display settings though.

The main reason for trying 8.10 was the new kernel and wireless stack, and I must say that the increased hardware compatability is well worth it!

Recently, I bought a nearly new HP 2710p.  I immediately formatted the HD and installed Ubuntu Hardy!  I am very pleased that nearly everything works! Suspend and resume with accelerated graphics and rotation was something I really wanted with my TC1100. I was lucky that this machine was configured with and Intel 4965 AGN card and a WWAN card (which I have not yet activated).  The 2710p is very much like a super-charged TC1100 with dual-cores and other modern conveniences like a fingerprint scanner and a smart-card reader.  Mine did not come with the webcam though I don’t think I’ll miss the feature much. Battery life is very good and the design is very clean. Removing the annoying palmrest stickers required Goo-Gone, but the finish was unharmed. Here are some notes about getting this bad-boy configured in Ubuntu:

Some things that seem to be missing are:

• Wacom support, which I found HERE (gentoo hardware wiki)
• Screen Rotation: Make a script called rotate.sh

$ nano ~/rotate.sh
with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
#script by Francisco Athens modified from Gentoo Wiki Intructions:
#http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_HP_Compaq_2710p#Brightness_and_Rotation
#get current setting
testrot=`xrandr -q |grep LVDS | awk '{print $3}'`
#test if screen is rotated in protrait mode
if [ "$testrot" = "800x1280+0+0" ];then
#optional kill any old xvkbd instances so that
# fresh one can load in the correct place in the screen
#killall xvkbd
xrandr -o normal
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 0
xsetwacom set eraser rotate 0
else
#killall xvkbd
xrandr --output LVDS --rotate right
xsetwacom set stylus Rotate CW
xsetwacom set eraser Rotate CW
#optional: put xvkbd on the bottom of the screen
#xvkbd -always-on-top -geometry 800x150+0-0
fi

chmod +x ~/rotate.sh

• Kernel Panic on lid close! This is a big issue, but I found the solutution HERE (Ubuntu Forums)

I edited my /etc/rc.local:
first make sure the path is correct
$ ls /proc/acpi/video/
there should be only one folder, so in my case for “C09A” add this line to /etc/rc.local:

echo "1" > /proc/acpi/video/C09A/DOS

before the “exit 0″ line

• Fingerprint Reader Support can be found HERE
• Current Ubuntu Hardy 2.6.24 iwl4965 driver appears to have problems connecting to TTLS/PAP 802.1x networks (sigh) as reported HERE (intel linux wireless forums).