Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat on a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet

Last updated: 2010.10.24

Thanks to the proprieter of http://luke.no-ip.org/x60tablet/ for letting me use his page design.

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
Screen Rotation
Input Trackpoint
Pen
Special keys
Fingerprint Reader
Networking Ethernet
Wireless (3945ABG)
Bluetooth
WWAN
External Connections USB
Firewire
Secure Digital
PCMCIA
ACPI CPU Frequency Scaling
Suspend
Hibernate
Extra Features Reducing power consumption
Enabling accents & umlauts
Reducing Mathematica cpu utilization
Connecting to iPhone
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

Details

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.

Screen Rotation

Automatic screen rotation triggered by swivelling the screen down is no more, as for some reason acpi isn't handling the swivel events properly (per acpi_listen the events are generated, but not acted on). So I decided just to remap the rotate key on the screen bezel to do the job manually.

In System > Preferences > Keyboard shortcuts create a new shortcut and set it to execute the script /usr/local/bin/toggle-rotation when triggered by the screen rotation key (just press the key once to capture the keycode). Download the script here and copy to /usr/local/bin, making it executable. Before running it the first time, create the file .rotate-status in /tmp with the contents "normal".

Special Keys

Volume keys work but the changes aren't noticed by the audio indicator applet. To fix this, install sysfsutils, then add the line
devices/platform/thinkpad_acpi/hotkey_mask = 0x00ffffff
to /etc/sysfs.conf and reboot. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1328016&page=4)

Reducing Power Consumption

Thinkwiki has a nice page on this, though some of it might be a bit dated by now. In particular, it used to be possible to reduce the power of the iwl3945 wireless device, but this was found to cause connectivity problems, so power save support was dropped. Nevertheless, the right palmrest doesn't seem to get quite as hot as in earlier ubuntu releases.

Enabling accents and umlauts

This is easily done using xmodmap. Run
xmodmap -pke > .Xmodmap
to generate an .Xmodmap file with the current settings. Edit this file to set a key of your choice to "Mode_switch" (in the first column). This enables access to the key definitions in the third and fourth columns (the latter by also pressing shift). For instance, to create a key for ä, set the third column of the a key to "adiaeresis".

Gnome will ask you if you want to use this file at the next login.

Reducing Mathematica cpu utilization

There's a bug in Mathematica which causes it to use roughly 15% of the cpu even at idle. Fortunately, there's a fix available here.

Connecting to iPhone

Rhythmbox seems to be able to talk to my iPhone 3G (firmware version 3.1) out of the box (though it can't access podcasts).

Useful Tablet Software

Other Resources