Installing FC5 on my TabletPC

The Tablet

TabletPCs have been around for a while now, but haven't really caught on. Certainly I haven't used my tablet that much. The applications aren't terribly compelling, and the lack of a keyboard is a real hindrance.

But it is still a cool technology, and I think we'll eventually find a way to make TabletPCs much more useful and common.

And aside from anything else, it's a good excuse for programming something new.

My tablet is a Toshiba Portege 3500 in particular. I got it used on eBay several years ago. Although old and unsexy now, it is surprisingly durable. It has travelled to several countries with me, and the screen and tablet surface is still in good shape. The 12.1" screen, while small for most laptops, is large for even today's TabletPCs. And best of all, it is light and portable. (Although read the caveats below before you run out and buy one).

But of course, as soon as I got it, I had to install Linux on it. I wanted a dual-boot machine, but you apparently can't do that with the TabletPC edition of Windows. So I opted for a full Linux instal.

Older Linux Installs

I'd installed previous linux distributions on my tablet before. In particular, Fedora Core 4 had worked pretty well. I didn't use the tablet much, but the pen worked and I goofed around with a few inking programs.

Here's one good install page for Linux on Porteges: Rob Ekl's 3500 page (also see the new page here ).

But there was one key feature that didn't work: rotation of the screen! The whole point of the tablet was that you could swivel the screen around and write on it as if it was a notepad. That worked flawlessly in Windows. But Linux (and in particular, X) had big problems with rotation. This is supposed to work via X Resize and Rotate , (acronym: xrandr). But xrandr doesn't usually work out of the box, at least not for me. Everytime I tried to run it, it would complain that rotated modes weren't possible.

The best you can do is manually tweak your X config files (XF86Config for older systems, xorg.conf for newer xorg servers). But that involves restarting X everytime you want to change rotations! Really, Linux should automatically rotate the display everytime you switch the screen orientation, just like Windows does.

But I didn't worry about it at the time, since I didn't use the tablet that much.

Installing FC5

But I am now starting to think about upgrading my laptop (sometime in 2007), and I'll have to make a decision: get another TabletPC or not? So I'd like to get my Portege as tablet-aware as possible, to see if I'd use TabletPC functionality more in the future.

I decided to upgrade to Fedora Core 5 to see if newer drivers fixed the xrandr problem. Upgrading on any machine is always an exercise fraught with peril, and it is all the more perilous if you have funky hardware like the Portege 3500.

For instance, the Portege 3500 series doesn't have a built-in CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. Furthermore, they won't boot from a USB drive! So you have to buy a proprietary DVD-ROM drive with a 16-bit PCMCIA interface. Yuk.

That's already annoying, just from a hardware perspective. But many install programs freak out with this configuration, because they can't detect the drive they're loading from. So I typically had to install software using PXE or a separate web server.

For FC5, I discovered that the FC5 boot CDs couldn't detect the drive they were in (!). So I had to copy all of the install CDs to my webserver, boot my Toshiba from the PCMCIA-attached DVD-ROM drive, and once the install program had bootstrapped itself, have it continue the install from my webserver. And they wonder why Linux hasn't yet displaced Windows for mainstream consumers.

Anyways, once the FC5 install process had started, here is what I did to install Fedora Core 5 on my Toshiba Portege 3500 (listed here for any Portege owners how to do it):

 1. Perform the basic FC5 install. This installs the 2.6.15 kernel.

 2. The 2.6.15 kernel may have problems with the wacom drivers. I couldn't get it to work. And in any case, don't bother, since the next step is:

 3. Perform a yum upgrade to get the newest of everything. This will upgrade to the 2.6.18 kernel (at least as of late January 2007). You can check your kernel version by running uname -a.

Now we need to install the wacom drivers so the tablet will work. There is an excellent mini-how to here: Mini HOWTO for Updating Wacom Driver on FC4 and FC5 . I'm going to paraphrase those instructions here. (One note: when initializing the serial connection, the Portege uses port 0x0338 on IRQ 4).

 4. Go to the linuxwacom project website and download the linuxwacom package that matches your kernel version.

 5. Build and install X drivers. (The Portege uses the serial driver for the tablet, not the USB driver, so you don't need to install kernel drivers).

 6. Update the xorg.conf file as per the mini-howto. You need to add the new InputDevices, and reference them in the ServerLayout section.

 7. Reboot. Voila! You now have FC5 installed, and the tablet works.

Now I just needed rotation to work. But again, xrandr doesn't work in FC5. At least, not for the Portege 3500. So I still need to figure that out.

I've got a question posted at Linux Questions.org . Hopefully I'll get some helpful responses.

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