Ubuntu on Fujitsu Siemens ST5112

Dear folks,

I haven't been a busy blogger lately. The reason is mostly that I do not have much time left for blogging, but a reason may also be that there isn't that much to write about either.

I know that some of the readers of this page might expect some qtpfsgui news, as I more or less promised to look into some bugs. Unfortunately, there haven't been any time left for that this summer. I am a family man, you know. So, no qtpfsgui hacking this summer (and not much of photography either unfortunately). And the fall looks quite busy, so I won't make any promises.

What I can say a few words about, though, is the new computer I got this week. It's a tablet I'm testing out as a notetaking device for meetings and stuff like that - a Fujistu Siemens ST5112. Actually, this is the second device of this kind I have put my hands on this summer. The other is the Sahara i440D from Tabletkiosk - a capable device in itself, but not much to write about here as I left windows running on it, because another more windows friendly colleague was supposed to test it too. From a design point of view, however, the Sahara is a likeable computer!

I have spent a few hours today with the ST5112 installing Ubuntu. Or actually, I did a basic Ubuntu installation yesterday, and used the night to do the necessary apt-get upgrade; the amount of security and otherwise updates on 8.04 is rather long. Today, I have tweaked settings to adapt to the tablet environment. As the ST5112 does not have a keyboard at all I must be able to do most things without one. I have installed the xvkbd package which gives an onscreen keyboard that can be used when absolutely necessary, but I really like to avoid it for most things. But I am getting lost in details here. The important information is:

• X work almost out of the box. Had to add the RandRRotation (True) in order to make rotation with xrandr work.
• Screen rotation works (now), and I tweaked a script I found online that make the mouse recalibrate to the rotated screen
• Wacom pen input works out of the box, as soon as setserial and wacom stuff was installed. Had to add the wacom lines manually in xorg.conf, though.
• Wifi works out of the box
• Suspend/resume work out of the box. I set the option that stores and resumes the VGA but I don't know whether it was absolutely necessary.
• Bluetooth keyboard and mouse works just fine, but must be configured manually by running hciscan/hidd and edit the hcid.conf file.
• Even most of the hotkeys on one side of the ST5112 works out of the box, like page up/down, scroll buttongs, and hotkey for starting the email program.
• The only thing that don't work so far is sound. I have read enough on the net to avoid start thinkering with it; it will probably need some attention...

Bottom line is that I think I can use Ubuntu on this one. I still have to do some scripting in order to move my meeting notes taken with Xournal (probably) over to Evernote, but that is just fun! As Evernote don't have a linux version yet, I must move the notes over using email.

The end is: If you are looking for a tablet pc that works with Linux, the ST5112 from Fujitsu Siemens can easily be your answer.

The major drawback? Only 1024x768 resolution on the screen. But I have to work with it a few days before I make a finale conclusion on that. Maybe it is ok for the intended use!

Take care folks.

And if you like, follow me on twitter.com/mandus; that's where most of my netprecense is now.