Ubuntu on an Acer TM C300

I recently replaced the hard drive in my Acer Travelmate C300 Tablet PC and decided I wanted to be able to dual-boot Windows XP Tablet and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. In order to do this, the Acer recovery disks were used to install XP on the entire drive (recovery disks do not allow for partitioning and you cannot buy a clean install of XP tablet....*sigh*). Once Windows was happy (and before installing any other software), one of the IT guys at school used Partition Magic to create a 30 GB partition, which left Windows with about 80. I installed Ubuntu from the hot boot cd and followed the directions for a dual boot system, creating a main partition for Ubuntu and a swap partition. The swap should be created as a logical partition at a size that is ~ 2 times your RAM (e.g. I used 1 GB, having 512 ram). The main partition is also set as logical and the mount location should be set to "/". After the partitions are set, I let the rest of the install run accordingly. Now when I boot up my system, I have an option of which operating system I would like to use. My goal is to only put open-source software on my Ubuntu partition.

Not all of my Tabet PC functions worked with Ubuntu out of the box. A few things needed some tweaking. The first challenge was getting my wacom stylus to work under Ubuntu. Here is what eventually worked for me (pulled from various online sources, including this site from Ubuntu forums):

1. Run any Ubuntu updates that are ready for the system

2. Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager -> (or use apt-get install from a terminal window) and install the following:

xinput
setserial
wacom-tools
wacom-kernel-source
xserver-xorg-input-wacom

3. Edit your xorg.conf file to add information for your stylus. Add the following:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver        "wacom"
Identifier    "cursor"
Option        "Device"    "/dev/ttyS0"
Option        "Type"        "cursor"
Option        "ForceDevice"    "ISDV4"
Option        "BottomX"    "28800"
Option        "BottomY"    "21760"
Option        "Mode"        "absolute"
Option        "TPCButton"    "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver        "wacom"
Identifier    "stylus"
Option        "Device"    "/dev/ttyS0"
Option        "Type"        "stylus"
Option        "ForceDevice"    "ISDV4"
Option        "BottomX"    "28800"
Option        "BottomY"    "21760"
Option        "Mode"        "absolute"
Option        "TPCButton"    "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver        "wacom"
Identifier    "eraser"
Option        "Device"    "/dev/ttyS0"
Option        "Type"        "eraser"
Option        "ForceDevice"    "ISDV4"
Option        "BottomX"    "28800"
Option        "BottomY"    "21760"
Option        "Mode"        "absolute"
Option        "TPCButton"    "on"
EndSection

Then under the "Server Layout" section, add the following:

InputDevice     "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice     "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice     "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"

4. Edit/create a /etc/serial.conf file:

#Stylus pen
/dev/ttyS0 port 0x06f8 irq 6 uart 16550A

5. Go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Start up Programs
Add the following command:

/usr/X11R6/bin/./xinput set-button-map stylus 1 3 2 4


6. Reboot the system and Voila! Your stylus should now be working and you can create lovely works of art such as the example below, created in GIMP: