HOW TO: Install Ubuntu on a HP TC1100 tablet pc

[phenest]

Ok, wow. I got it to work. THANK YOU I know what I did wrong, too. You see what you put in bold up there, the "don't change anything else" part?

That's what I didn't do!

Information for all:

Please remember, that if you're going to follow any guide in the Ubuntu forums, you must do what the instructions tell you to do, and nothing else. It will save you a lot of time and bother of asking the same questions over, and over again, and getting nothing but headaches.

As an example: some here seem to think that because the pen won't work, that maybe they need to install the drivers. If the guide doesn't tell you to install them, then that is because you don't need to. If you decide to install non-standard drivers, and things break, then that becomes outside of the scope of this guide. If you wish to use non-standard stuff, then do it (at the very least), after you have it working first.

The guide is all you need to make this work. A lot of stuff (particularly drivers), already ships with a basic Ubuntu installation, so this guide is no more than a few 'tweaks'. So don't make it harder for yourself by adding stuff that isn't there.

Have fun.

[trksh22]

Yes, thanks!! I was definitely making everything MUCH harder than it needed to be. Had I just read what was there, then I wouldn't have had to go through days of feeling like I couldn't do it.

Hopefully someone new will come along, read what I went through, and make sure that they follow the directions and know what NOT to do

[g0ldenchild562]

Hi I'm new, how do I edit the xorg.conf? I keep getting an error saying I dont have permission.

[zoomy942]

Hi I'm new, how do I edit the xorg.conf? I keep getting an error saying I dont have permission.

open a terminal window and type

suod gedit

[Aearenda]

That's a mis-type - it should be

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

or better

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

which will ask for the password using a dialog box instead of the terminal.

You can also press ALT and F2 to bring up the 'Run application' box, and do the 'gksudo' version in there - this is the equivalent of start->run on Windows.

[Aearenda]

I have my TC1100 running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) reasonably well now. For the record, I had to...

1. Install the nvidia beta drivers from intrepid-proposed (now in intrepid-updates) to enable rotation (see earlier in this thread) and my external monitor. See http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/?cat=2 for comments and instructions. Alberto does a great job. This driver presently has a bug with KDE 3 (only affects me if I have compositing turned on) and Wine fonts but if you don't use these it's fine on the TC1100 (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122350, and now there's a workaround at http://nancib.wordpress.com/2008/11/...ine-this-week/). I tried nouveau but it was too slow. The nv driver works fine if you don't need to use external screens or projectors. The nvidia driver works fine with metacity compositing and even allows compiz to be turned on, but compiz wasn't stable.
UPDATE: The nv driver supports rotation too. If you don't need to use an external screen or projector, and you don't need 3D acceleration, the nv driver will be enough and it lets you use hibernate and standby properly. Post 126 tells how.

2. UPDATED - 21 November 2008: Install Ndiswrapper and the Windows XP driver for the wireless network, taken from HP's SP30102A update. This seems to be more reliable than ath5k and to associate quicker than ath_pci, for me. It doesn't introduce any of the mouse jerkiness I saw with the backported drivers installed, and doesn't need a newer Network Manager.

So, don't do this: OLD STEP 2: Install the latest network-manager from PPA to overcome a wireless association timeout with ath_pci, and it is still much slower to associate than Hardy was. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/292054.
UPDATE - 19 November 2008: I have installed linux-backports-modules-intrepid to see if the ath5k driver improves the association times. The process is described in many forum threads - the important bit is to blacklist ath_hal and ath_pci in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. This improves association time considerably, and ath5k performs much better than it did during the Intrepid alpha builds. However, there is collateral damage: a new version of ssb is installed as well, but no matching b44 driver, so we lose wired networking! Also, mouse responsiveness suffers for some reason I have yet to fathom. I have kludged a working system by overwriting the updated ssb driver with the stock ssb driver for the same kernel version and then doing 'update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`' but I'm not recommending this change to anyone else.
LATER THE SAME DAY: There's an update to linux-backports-modules-intrepid in intrepid-proposed that fixes the b44 issue properly. It still leaves the mouse jerky every so often when wireless is enabled, and it seems that this coincides with when Network Manager is re-associating, which it does every two minutes!

3. Install uswsusp to make hibernate worth the effort - otherwise it was slower to wake from hibernate than to do a cold boot. This prevents going to standby, but I've never been able to get it to resume from standby reliably with the nvidia driver anyway. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...53/comments/18. I installed uswsusp in Synaptic and then modified /etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module to contain

SLEEP_MODULE="uswsusp" # was "kernel"
SUSPEND_MODULES="ath_pci ath_rate_sample ath_hal"

UPDATE - 29 Nov 2008: Hibernate still fails randomly with the nvidia driver. I suppose it IS still a beta <sigh>. This overrides my comment on 16th about it not having failed.
UPDATE - 16 Nov 2008: It seems the unreliability was associated with running the netbook-launcher - that is, it hasn't failed since I stopped running that. Also, to get wireless to resume after hibernation, I find I have to use tc1100-wmi to turn it back on (see below). I made a copy of /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/10NetworkManager in /etc/pm/sleep.d and added 'echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/tc1100-wmi/wireless' before the 'thaw' dbus command to wake Network manager. Actually this probably ought to have gone in a separate entry, say '15TurnWirelessOn' with just the echo bit in it. The SUSPEND_MODULES list only needs ath_pci in it. I have blacklisted agpgart in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and set agp=off in /boot/grub/menu.lst (see the line starting '# defoptions', on mine it is '# defoptions=quiet splash resume=/dev/sda5 vga=791 agp=off' - note that the leading '#' is important here) and nvAGP="1" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Hibernate works for me, but standby won't work reliably with the nvidia driver, and if it does come back, the wireless hardware is clobbered until next reboot.

UPDATED - 15 December 2008: I have found that putting 'Option "NvAGP" "0"' in the xorg.conf file allows standby to work reliably with the nvidia driver, and it doesn't clobber the wireless! I have to turn the wireless on though, using tc1100-wmi.

4. Turn off keypad control for the mouse, when using an external keyboard, from the keyboard preferences (http://nancib.wordpress.com/2008/03/...-ubuntu-hardy/ has simple intructions, bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rd/+bug/197589).

5. Fix my external CD drive so it didn't close the drawer as soon as it was opened (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...16/comments/34).
UPDATE: This is now fixed automatically.

6. Load the tc1100-wmi module to gain control of screen brightness and the wireless kill switch (see earlier in this thread). This now works without the use of sudo. To turn wireless off do

echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/tc1100-wmi/wireless

and to turn it back on

echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/tc1100-wmi/wireless

to enable jogdial brightness do

echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/tc1100-wmi/jogdial

and to return to normal (page up/down) do

echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/tc1100-wmi/jogdial

UPDATE - 19 November 2008: Brightness isn't working every time, neither is the jogdial doing its normal pageup/pagedown function reliably. Probably associated with the xmodmap experiment I have done (but not yet written up) to try to get the side button to control the internal/external screen as in Windows.
UPDATED - 15 December 2008: I have found that it is necessary to use tc1100-wmi to set the normal jogdial mode after waking from standby.

7. Installed wacom-tools and copied the pen details from my Hardy xorg.conf (see earlier in this thread). I believe there is a better way to do this using hal fdi files in Intrepid, but I haven't looked at that yet.

8. Enabled laptop-mode - see Intrepid comments in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerManagem...load%20cycling) and then monitor the Load_Cycle_Count in smartctl to see if you need to do anything about your drive.

UPDATE: I have a non-standard 7200 rpm Hitachi drive in my TC1100. I have set /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to use 254 for HDD power management on both battery and AC power, and to do idle spindown after 60 seconds on battery. I don't subscribe to the theory that battery power = increased likelihood of physical shock. YMMV.


9. [ADDED 25 November] Disabled input device hotplugging using evdev. This was crashing X whenever I plugged my keyboard in. I found this the hard way after taking a morning's handwritten notes on a course using Xournal, which does not have a timed-save feature. My notes were lost when I plugged the keyboard in during the lunch break. I reverted to Hardy again for the rest of the course (luckily I have a dual-boot setup). I later found that the X crash would occur if I put the tablet in the dock, or if I plugged in the normal keyboard. I don't know if this is related to my attempts to modify the side key map (which I have successfully done on Hardy, so that I can switch monitors using the same side key as the Windows XP driver uses), or whether it has had the potential to crash this way from day 1.
I added the following to xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
	Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
EndSection

And I set the keyboard layout to 105-key international.



Other stuff not specific to the TC1100:
I also upgraded to OpenOffice 3 (but see below) from the PPA (http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008...intrepid-ibex/ has a simple how-to), Sunbird 0.9 from Mozilla (just follow their instructions - install in /opt/sunbird), and Thunderbird, xournal, vym, k3b and amarok from the standard repos.

UPDATE: I find amarok stutters a bit - now trying banshee (It turned out not to be Amarok's fault - it works fine). I have also installed vym 1.12.0 by compilation from source to fix a bug on opening saved files when saved with embedded notes. This also allows landscape printing to work properly, which it didn't in Hardy. Xournal doesn't work properly with the pen unless the zoom factor is set to page width.

UPDATE - 21 Nov 2008: I have downgraded OpenOffice again, owing to slowness and some apparent corruption in saved writer documents.

25 Nov - I am beginning to think I need to re-install from scratch, as I have had to muck with so much to get Intrepid working that I no longer trust the installation. There have been too many failed attempts to fix things on my part, and I am not good at cleaning up after failed fixes; so now it keeps biting me, like with the keyboard X crash losing my course notes. Intrepid has been by far the hardest release to install on the TC1100 (note that I don't do upgrades - I do a fresh installation into a separate partition each time, so this isn't due to a long series of upgrades; and I've done every release since Breezy) and it's the first one I have seriously contemplated skipping (which also means Hardy set a high standard that is hard to match in a non-LTS release).

Jan 2009 - In the end, though, Intrepid has ended up being my best-performing release so far! This is because of getting suspend to work properly.

[g0ldenchild562]

How do I enable the visaul effect? When I do try to enable it, it keeps telling me that the desktop can't enable.

[Aearenda]

g0ldenchild562: If you are running Hardy, it won't work because the code checks for 64Mb Video RAM and the TC1100 only has 32Mb. You can hack it, but it gives black screens all over the place and isn't worth the effort. In Intrepid, it will turn on, but it doesn't stay on for me.

You can try Metacity compositing - see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=924124 but see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ty/+bug/218322

[g0ldenchild562]

Hey thanks for the response, I actually have the original Ubuntu 8.10. I don't understand the difference between the hardy or the other versions out there. Anyways I manage to get it working by installing the Envyng driver. The effects are so cool!!!!

[g0ldenchild562]

I'm still having problems getting the stylus to work. I did everything that was posted on the first page.