Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on the Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet

Last updated: 2009.07.29

The good news is that now almost everything works right out of the box!
(Thanks to the proprieter of http://luke.no-ip.org/x60tablet/ for letting me use his page design. It's good.)

My Hardware

6363-2AU (1.6 GHz) with 3 GB ram, 320 GB disk, and SXGA+ screen (1400x1050).

At a glance

Display	X.org
	External VGA
	Brightness Control
	Automatica Screen Rotation
Input	Trackpoint
	Pen
	Special keys
	Fingerprint Reader
Networking	Ethernet
	Wireless (3945ABG)
	Others
External Connections	USB
	Firewire
	Secure Digital
	PCMCIA
ACPI	CPU Frequency Scaling
	Suspend
	Hibernate
Extra Features	Reducing Power Consumption
	Detect tablet orientation
	Active hard drive protection

Works out of the box

Needs tweaking, but works

Hacking required

Only partly works

Does not work

Unchecked

X.org

Apparently there are some issues with the graphics driver and kernel. After first installing the system seemed to get stuck when starting X (though now I think this is/was a hard drive issue), so I followed the "safe" instructions here. This seemed to cause trouble with suspend/resume and switching to other ttys (Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.), so I disabled uxa acceleration (wrote exa instead in xorg.conf).

Brightness control

Out of the box I only get four brightness levels when using Fn+Home/Fn+End. However, when dragging the slider in the Power Management application, it's clear that there are 7 possible levels.

Automatic Screen Rotation

There are (at least) three things that need to be performed when rotating the screen: the screen rotation itself, plus changing the stylus orientation and remapping the tablet buttons to match. Optionally, compiz can be switched on and off, but it seems to work properly in both modes, so I leave it on. Here's how to get all of it working.

Ensure the package wacom-tools is installed.
To rotate the screen, download my script here (it's based on http://liken.otsoa.net/pub/x41t/rotatetablet), save it as /usr/local/bin/rotate, and make it executable. Try the commands "rotate right" and then "rotate normal"; the orientation of the screen should change and then return to normal.
The script will probably complain about the stylus not being found, and the stylus orientation will not be rotated with the screen. To fix this, install the wacomtohal script detailed here. Run it and the stylus should rotate with the screen. (Additionally, using this script makes wacomcpl work, which you can use to calibrate the stylus. It's in the package xserver-xorg-input-wacom.)
Add a line to the /etc/sudoers file (with visudo) to allow the script to remap the arrow keys:
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/setkeycodes
To enable automatic rotation, download x60t-swivel-down and x60t-swivel-up and copy them into /etc/acpi/events/. Change "tablet" in down to "right" and "laptop" in up to "normal". Restart acpid with
sudo /etc/init.d/acpid restart
Finally, to fix a calibration problem after resuming from sleep, download 03calibrate.sh, put it in /etc/pm/sleep.d/, change ownership to root, and make it executable.

The screen should now rotate on its own. If it's not working automatically, check that the acpi events defined in the swivel files are correct with acpi_listen. I haven't attempted to set up automatic orientation since I invariably use the tablet in the default mode.

Reducing Power Consumption

Thinkwiki has a nice page on this. In particular, reducing the power of the wifi device helps keep the palmrest from bursting into flame.

Useful Tablet Software

Xournal Journal software with the ability to annotate PDFs.
CellWriter Trainable, multilanguage handwriting recognition and onscreen keyboard.
Dasher Predictive text input using the mouse or stylus.

Other Resources

http://luke.no-ip.org/x60tablet/
http://blog.theadventus.com/yuit/2009/06/01/screen-rotation-for-jaunty-on-my-x60-tablet/
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wacom-tools/+bug/295292
http://blog.aliencam.net/tag/jaunty/
ThinkWiki
http://dev.cavatina.no/wiki/index.php/X60_Tablet - Fellow x60 user with lots of tips on extending battery life
Ubuntu wiki page
Thinkpad Forum
http://ofb.net/~wnoise/lenovo-x60-tablet/