Hibernate happy in Ubuntu 8.10: Itrepid Ibex

This morning I updated my Ubuntu distribution to 8.10: Intrepid Ibex. It took a fair amount of time on the hotel's wireless connection to download all the necessary packages, but after that the actual install was pretty quick. Upon restart, my tablet pen no longer worked. A quick peek at the xorg.conf file showed me why. Ubuntu 8.10 uses HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to control a lot of the input devices (such as my trackpad) and it therefore commented out a lot of the device specifications in the config file. I removed the comment symbol (#) only from the sections dealing with my tablet pen (detailed in a previous blog) and restarted. Now everything seems to be happy and I once again have a working tablet pen. The hibernate function also seems to be working now, which is something I never did get figured out in 8.04. It takes a few seconds to go into and come out of hibernate (long enough to make you wonder), but it does indeed work.

The only weird thing I have discovered so far is again related to the function keys. After installing the acerhk module in 8.04, the mail client would open whenever I hit the web browser button and nothing would happen when I hit the mail button. Under 8.10, the web browser button still opens my mail client, but now mail button opens my web browser. At some point I should figure out what file controls how these keys are mapped and reconfigure it.

Hibernate fails in Ubuntu 8.04

Upon, first installing Ubuntu, I am pretty sure that both the sleep and hibernate functions worked on my computer. They have not been working recently though. When the computer attempts to hibernate, I see this issue:

[ some varying # (time stamp I assume) ]: i8042 kbd 00:07: activation failed

The screen then goes blank after a few minutes and the computer shuts down. When I hit the power button, I must completely reboot. 

I reverted back to the old kernel (2.6.24-19) to see if this solved the issue, but to no avail. Interestengly though, the function keys still worked, so that means another update besides the kernel was responsible for them suddenly working.

The Ubuntu mystery continues....

If anyone has any ideas on the hibernate issue, I am all ears. 

Acer Hotkeys in Ubuntu

Recently, I decided I would try and see if I could get my ACER hotkeys working under Ubuntu. These control the special function buttons (wireless, bluetooth,e mail, web, P1, P2) as well as the function keys such as the volume and screen brightness control.

First I downloaded and installed: acerhk.tar.bz2

I did an lsmod > txt file before and after installation and performed a difference on the two to see if the linux module was indeed changed. The module had certainly been modified. An lsmod | grep Acer returned the following:

monica@Tzedakah:~$ lsmod | grep acer
acerhk 26036 0
wmi_acer 9644 0

I then edited the /etc/modules and added "acerhk" to the top of the list, so the module will boot at startup.

I restarted my system and voila: nothing. I decided not to mess with it for a while and went about other business.

A few days later I tried controlling volume using the function keys out of habit, forgetting they would not work. But it did work! Complete with a little image that popped up showing the volume bar. I could not believe it! The only thing I could figure is that a day or so before I had updated my system to the latest Linux kernel: 2.6.24-21.

So all of my "Fn" keys seem to work and some of my special softkeys work too, albeit not exactly in the correct way. For example, my mail button does nothing, but press the web button and Eudora (the mail client) opens. Another interesting one is that if I press the bluetooth button, my screen locks and asks for my passowrd. The screen rotations buttons also do not work. Once I have time, I will have to tackle this issue. In the meantime, I am happy to be able to control volume using the keyboard again.

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: