Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) on Thinkpad X61t
Chad Jones, January 2010
The "sluggish pen" problem for the wacom stylus wasn't an issue in
Jaunty and wasn't an issue for me initially when I installed Karmic.
However, the problem reappeared for me. I believe it is related to the
"touch" lines in the wacom.fdi file that fixes the pen alignment after
rotation. For example, see
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/X61T
To fix this problem, I removed and reinstalled the "wacom" packages (2
of them) using Synaptic. Then I deleted the lines referring to "touch"
in wacom.fdi (my x61t does not have the multitouch screen). Now the pen
seems to work fine without skipping.
Here is my /etc/hal/fdi/policy/wacom.fdi file, which seems to
work.
Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) on Thinkpad X61t
Chad Jones, March 2009
I had trouble with the stylus on my thinkpad in 8.10. In particular,
the calibration would start out fine, but after a "rotate and suspend"
of the tablet, the calibration would be off by about an inch. wacomcpl
would fix this, but I could never hit the center of the dot precisely,
and doing this every time was a pain. Here's a fix that works even
better.
First, after a reboot, find the "good" values for the stylus by
~> xsetwacom get stylus TopX
~> xsetwacom get stylus TopY
~> xsetwacom get stylus BottomX
~> xsetwacom get stylus BottomY
Each command will return a number (mine are 0, 0, 24576, and 18432, but
I bet it depends on your screen resolution).
After a "rotate and suspend" your calibration will be off now (you can
check by looking at these values again). To set the right values, just
change the "get" to "set" and add the correct values to the end of the
command:
xsetwacom set stylus TopX 0
xsetwacom set stylus TopY 0
xsetwacom set stylus BottomX 24576
xsetwacom set stylus BottomY 18432
Put these commands in a script, and then you can just run the script
whenever necessary.
Ubuntu Gutsy on Thinkpad X61t
Chad Jones, January 2008
Update May 2008: Most of what follows seems to be unnecessary
with Hardy Heron (although the presentation and xournal notes are still
helpful). And suspend now works perfectly for me! As near as I can
tell, Ubuntu Hardy and the Thinkpad X61t work quite well "out of the box."
Some notes about using Ubuntu (Gutsy) on a Thinkpad X61t.
1. In general, most things work well. This web site (and links) was helpful to
me:
http://luke.no-ip.org/x60tablet/#rotate_script
2. For presentations using an external LCD projector, this works.
To start the presentation after external projector is hooked up:
xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA --auto
To end the presentation:
xrandr --output VGA --off
xrandr --output LVDS --auto
These commands can be placed in a script/applet/whatever.
3. My Sierra Wireless card (MC5725) for WWAN now works. I had one major
problem in getting it setup. In general, the instructions here work:
http://www.sierrawireless.com/faq/ShowFAQ.aspx?ID=601
However, my card has a product id of 0220, not 0020 (try the command
"lsusb"). The sierra.c module (1.06 or 1.26.b) assumes it is the
latter. To fix this, I followed the instructions above but then edited
the sierra.c file before compiling (with "make" and "make install" as in
the instructions) to change the product id for all
mc5725 entries (there were two) to 0220. Before that, my system did not
recognize the aircard (no /dev/ttyUSB0 created). After that, it
did.
To get it to load with every reboot, I added the following lines to /etc/rc.local
cd /home/chad/Linux/SierraWireless (wherever you did "make")
./make install
I'm sure there's a better way than this, but at least this works.
The only other issue in getting the aircard working was that its radio
was off to start with. There are probably other ways to handle this,
but I found that using "minicom" was convenient. This is a simple modem
program that lets you enter the commands to the modem directly. In
particular
at!pcinfo
shows basic info. And to turn the radio on, I used
at!pcstate=1
Other useful commands can be found here:
http://www.anotherurl.com/library/at_test.htm.
The simple "gnome-ppp" worked well for me in getting the aircard working
-- it can autodetect my modem once the sierra.c problem is fixed.
3. I've tried both Jarnal and Xournal for marking up PDFs, etc. Xournal
seems to do a better job for me of reading all PDFs (e.g. from JStor
for academic articles).
4. Things that still do not quite work:
-- Suspend still has the "inu" text appearing, and sometimes crashes.
-- Right palmrest gets much hotter than in Vista.