Linux Tablet: P1510D

Back in January I bought a Fujitsu P1510D sub-notebook tablet PC. I had been using a powerbook at a previous job and had become quite fond of OS X, however when I decided to buy a laptop on my own dime, I really lusted for something extremely small and something not apple. A long time ago I bought a Sony Picturebook PCG-C1 sub notebook and used it for many years, its small size was great taking to conferences, I could slide it into pockets on some of my larger coats, and I really missed having a laptop that small. The fujitsu is very close in the size to the old picture book and has the benefit of a tablet swivel screen.

At the reccomendation of my roomate, I decided to try Ubuntu, he was running on his powerbook, desktop, and seemed quite pleased with it.
I started with the Ubuntu Breezy install CD booting off an external CDROM and did a normal install. Using the synaptic package manager (graphical interface to “apt”) I installed all the updates and proceeded to upgrade straight to the most recent release, Dapper. After completing the upgrade I was quite pleased with the results. I had sound and ethernet working. The Atheros A/B/G was recognzied. However configuring wireless throug the GUI tools was and still is quite problematic, I have never gotten it work right and resorted to writing a shell script to configure wireless. Basically what I found was that after “upping” the ath0 interface, the card refused to connect to the AP and would not change channels. However it would start to work if you chose the SSID “ANY” which for a lot of wireless cards means connect to whatever network you can find. So I ended up with this:

#!/bin/bash

INT=ath0

ESSID=$1

sudo ifconfig ath0 up

sudo iwconfig $INT essid ANY mode managed

sudo sleep 5

sudo iwconfig $INT essid $ESSID mode managed

sudo sleep 5

sudo dhclient $INT
A quick dirty hack to get working, now I just do wifi.sh desired-ssid.

At this point I still had a decent list of things to get working:

-Suspend to disk – out of the box this failed miserably, it resulted in my laptop powering down and the system going down ungracefully
-Suspend to ram – similar results
-Touch screen

-Tablet screen rotation

To get the touch screen working I tracked down a driver for xorg which can be found here.

After adding that to my xorg.conf and adding the following line to /etc/serial.conf:

/dev/ttyS0 uart 16550 port 0×220 irq 4
My touch screen was working in X, sweet.

For suspend to disk I ended up using Bernard’s kernel with experimental support for Suspend2. The fact that he has apt repository setup made it really easy.
So at this point I still had:

-Suspend to ram

-Tablet screen rotation

At some point along the way, probably in the kernel upgrades, suspend to RAM started working, however the screen would remain blank after waking up, very annoying. Adding a shell script in /etc/acpi/resume.d/ that did the following fixed it:

echo 4 > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/LCD/brightness
So at this point, tablet screen rotation is the only major thing left. There are some buttons that would be nice, but I am not really concerned about them. Xrandr does not appear to work on this laptop with Dapper and Xorg 7.0, so the screen rotation is out for now. From what I hear, in the 7.1 it works fine, but upgrading to 7.1 is not something I want to undertake at the moment.

I am just pretty happy that everything else works. Thanks to the people who posted the following pages documenting their experience with the P1510d, it made my life so much easier:

 http://www.psionik.com/p1510d/

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/fujitsu.html 

http://www.xmission.com/~bmidgley/p1510/ 

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