Short Version

A fairly normal installation works fine to the point of a fully functional ordinary laptop. The tablet features now work, though multiple fingers one the digitizer is still not functional.
My xorg.conf. Its not clean, and may not be the best one can do, but I figure others might find some useful tidbits.

Updates

  • 2009-06-17 Cleaner patch for tool separation.
  • 2009-05-21 Sloppy patch which separates pen and finger for the wacom driver and might integrate multitouch (haven't tested that part). See the touch screen sections for details.
  • 2009-05-11 Check out easystroke
  • 2009-05-08 dell-wmi patch to handle the XT hinge rotation events
  • 2009-05-08 new patch for current wacom drivers (tested with 0.8.3 but may also work with 0.8.2).
  • 2009-01-08 Playing with gestures in fvwm. Here's the relavent portion of my config fvwm_gestures. See the fvwm manpage for an explanation of the stroke sequences. Also watch the output from fvwm to see what sequences its reading.
  • 2009-01-08 Updated the touch section in my xorg.conf. Changed "Suppress" to 0. The wacom driver was ignoring taps to an annoying extent at the default value of "4".
  • 2009-01-08 Remapped the special buttons with xmodmap, so now I let the window manager handle them instead of xbindkeys. My config file, run with xmodmap in .Xsession, .Xclients, or whatever you choose to use for X startup scripts.
  • Touch screen working pretty nicely with wacom driver
  • Xrandr rotation partially working

    Hardware status

    CPU: Core 2 Duo Works 64 and 32 bit modes work fine
    Ethernet Works
    Use the "tg3" driver. May require a more recent kernel.
    Wireless 802.11n Trumobile (BCM4328) Works with ndiswrapper.
    SD reader working with 2.6.28
    Hinge Rotation Working!!!
    dell-wmi support has been added to release candidates of the 2.6.30 kernel. I've submitted a patch to add the rotation switch to that driver. See below for links to a patch for dell-wmi.c and a perl script to watch for events.
    Video Partial
    Various functionality with binary FGLRX, radeon and radeonhd drivers. See below for details.
    Digitizer (touch screen) Working (but requires patches and building)
    Kernels older than 2.6.27 will need a patch.
    Wacom driver works nicely with a little patching
    Touchpad (ALPS) Partial (please let me know if you have sucess with the synaptics/alps driver)
    It works just fine as a mouse, but its been behaving weirdly for me with the synaptic/alps driver.

    Debian install

    The wired network card did not work with the driver version in the stable installation disk. Use lenny or later.

    Gestures

    I've been using Easystroke for a few months now. I do not feel my personal gestures should be considered applicable to others, so I encourage you to consider how you use your own machine and the sorts of motions that are comfortable to you.

    I've found that it is not convenient to keep gestures on all the time, so I like to have a quick gesture to kill/dissable easystroke and have one of the screen buttons mapped to start it up again. Xournal and the grab and drag plugin for firefox/thunderbird do not really play well with an external gestures program running.

    For tablet mode, its a good idea to program gestures for common window operations (move, resize, close, maximize). Rotation by +90, -90, and 180 (the hinge and on screen button are programmed for specific orientations instead of arbitrary reorientation). Also, I like to keep handy gestures for pulling up the window list, and the main window manager menu. And of course gestures for favorite programs. Many of the gestures are convenient enough that I find myself using them even when not in tablet mode.

    Hinge Rotation

    Hinge events are sent through wmi. The linux 2.6.30 release candidates provide the base support for dell-wmi. This 0001-latitude-xt-wmi-rotation.patch adds the specific events sent by the latitude xt's hinge. I use this script dell_wmi_mon.pl with FvwmPerl to carry the events to the window manager. The script should mostly considered an example.

    Video

    Updated 2008-08-25
    FeatureFGLRXati/radeonradeonhd
    Rotation no yes, but slow yes, but slow
    XV yes no no
    3D yes no no
    Switch to console flakey yes flakey
    Dynamic monitor control yes, requires thirdparty control panel yes with xrandr yes with xrandr
    Switch to console flakey yes flakey


    The open source drivers don't yet support XV, but mplayer with -vo x11 -zoom seems fast enough for everything I've tried so far. Mythtv playback is close to ok. FGLRX had problems with myth last time I tried it.
    The recent addition of r600 drm support might work, but I haven't yet figured out how. If you get it working, please email me.
    All drivers work fine with suspend and hibernation.
    For the most part it seems the radeonhd driver is trailing the older ati/radeon driver for support of this chip. There does seem to be a bit of collaboration between the two groups and flow of code back forth. Eventually they should merge. When I first got the tablet, the radeon driver did not work at all and so I used the radeonhd driver. Today, I check the status page and decided to try the radeon driver again. So far it seems fine.

    Touchscreen

    Made by N-Trig.

    update 2009-06-17

    For kernels >=2.6.30-git11 use this patch 0001-ntrig-tool-separation-and-pen-usages.patch. For 2.6.30 you can try applying these commits: commit-89f536c and commit-57fd637 but I personally haven't tried patching from a vanilla 2.6.30 kernel (let me know if you try it and it works).
    One minor note, sometimes the touch get dissabled after odd operations (like unloading and reloading the module while X and the wacom driver are running). I have not seen this problem during normal operation. If it does happen to you, try "xsetwacom set touch touch on".
    One bit of advice, I suggest using an alias or something to wrap xournal if you want to run it with pen only. "xsetwacom set touch touch off; xournal; xsetwacom set touch touch on". I don't know how to make xournal act intelligently when the touch sensor is active. But it works very nicely with touch off.

    update 2009-05-21

    Stephane Chatty has made interesting progress towards getting multitouch working. See the linux-input archives for details.

    If you are curious about multitouch, please read the linux-input archives before getting started.

    update 2009-05

    linuxwacom 0.8.2 and above refuse to work with unidentified tablets. This will id the n-trig. linuxwacom_0.8.3.patch Aside from that, I no longer use any special patches. The 2.6.29 kernel should suffice.

    update

    A new patch (0001-Added-quirks-for-the-N-Trig-digitizer.patch for 2.6.28 and ntrig_quirks.patch for 2.6.27.6) adds quirks support. With this patch the normal wacom driver works with the proper configurations. See my xorg.conf for my current settings. I also have these lines in my .Xsession:
  • xsetwacom set stylus Button2 "button 3"
  • xsetwacom set eraser Button1 "button 2"
  • xsetwacom set touch Button10 "button 1"
    For rotation, I wrote a script (xrotate.zsh) that calls xrandr and xsetwacom tadjust the video settings and set the parameters for the digitizer as well. I make no promises of userfriendlyness, so send me comments or updates if you want it more friendly.
    I use the rotate button on the screen to run xrotate.
    Though sloppy I also reset the digitizer parameters after sleep/hibernate using wac_reset.sh. This was a sloppy hack and leaves the digitizer in the normal orientation. I should probably just add a "reset_digitizer" option to my rotate script.

    Palm Detection

    While some palm detection seems to be in place, its just not enough for note taking. Here's a script toggle_touch.sh to toggle the touch input. It doesn't really work perfectly, but seems good enough for taking notes with the pen, I am not getting spurious doodles in xournal.

    old version

    For kernels older than 2.6.27, try this patch: ntrig_hid.patch
    linuxwacom-0.8.1-3.ntrig_hack.patch, a patch for the wacom X driver.

    My wacom patch is definitely just a hack. And not actually play nice with a real wacom tablet. This is just a hack on a beta version of a developement driver.
    Issues in wcmUSB.c that the patch addresses:
  • One branch actually only configures a couple variables if the device id is wacom. This may cause it to ignore touch events (need to double check).
  • The kernel is sending axis 2 and 3 and button 9 for touch events. I'm not actually sure wether the kernel or X driver should be responsible for fixing that. It might also provide a cleaner solution for the next problem.
  • Pen events seem to come with interlaced touch events causing misshandling of some events.
    With these patches I have pressure sensitivity with the pen. Two buttons assigned to the stylus device and one to the eraser. A single point with no pressure for the finger, but at least it works.
    In addition to my xorg.conf I have these lines in my xsession:
  • xsetwacom set stylus Button2 "button 3"
  • xsetwacom set eraser Button1 "button 2"
  • xsetwacom set touch Button10 "button 1"
    Note: with the wacom driver you can change what the buttons send. You can also use sequences and key strokes as well as mouse buttons.

    Side note: install the grab and drag plugin for firefox. It does wonders if you want to use a webbrowser with just your fingers.

    Ethernet

    The bcm5756ME works just fine with the tg3 driver in current kernels.

    Wireless ethernet

    The truemobile 1500/1505 is a bcm4328 pre-n card that does not currently work with the b43 driver. But ndisdriver works. Just get the driver from dell. In my case, dell had left the driver installer on the hard drive in c:\drivers.

    update

    I added an Atheros 5008 based card in the second slot. The ath9k driver does work, but I can't say I'm particularly impressed yet. And using both cards simultaneously sometimes causes a little interference. As the ath9k driver matures, I expect to move away from the broadcom and ndiswrapper.

    Bluetooth

    Worked out of the box.

    SD card reader

    Should work with the sdhci driver, but so far I haven't had any success.

    Touchpad

    Its an alps and the synaptic/alps driver recognizes it, if you specify alps mode, but it does not autodetect. For me its been behaving weirdly when the driver is enabled and I haven't looked into it yet.

    Finger Print Reader

    Works just fine with thinkfinger. I even have typing free login working in console mode.

    Screen Keys

    There are eight buttons/keys mounted on the screen. All send relatively normal codes through the keyboard interface. The codes are not included in the keymap I was using, so I've added these mappings:
  • setkeycodes e01f 72 e01b 75 e023 77 e01e 80 e058 120 e018 121 e01a 122 e017 123
    descriptionkeycodemapping
    up e01f72
    left e01b75
    right e02377
    down e01e80
    key e058120
    rotate e018121
    wrench e01a122
    mail e017123
    I use xbindkeys for the non-arrow keys.

    ACPI/power

    Battery

    With the DLV screen and the 1.2GHz cpu, I've been getting poor battery life (about 2 hours).

    cpu control

    I'm still experimenting with cpufreq controls of the 2 cores. Also sysfs seems to offer some additional features which need looking into.

    Suspend

    Memory sleep mode seems to mostly work. The hidraw devices seem to dissapear. Swapping batteries in the suspended state does not work.

    Hibernate

    Not yet tested.

    Hinge Rotation

    Need to write a wmi hook for it to work, whatever that means. It definitely is trying to make a wmi call through acpi.



    TuxMobil
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