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.

Ubuntu 8.04 on Oqo O2

Hmm,

I was pretty sure I wrote something on Ubuntu 8.04 on the Oqo, but I can't find it right now.

Short story: Use the alternate cd to install - everything is smooth. Or you can of course upgrade from and older version of Ubuntu.

Sad things: Wireless network doesn't work (but bluetooth do). And the wacom pen-input is still a joke, with unbearable amount of vectoring. And I can't get sound to work either. And you will still need a special modeline for Xorg (the same as in older versions of Ubuntu, the modeline is available here on the blog somewhere).

Bottom-line - the Oqo O2 with Ubuntu 8.04 is just a brick. Sorry to say so, but look elsewhere for a great, small, linux device. Of course I should have been positive, raving about all the things that do work. But for me wifi is crucial on such a small device, and so is sound. And the pen is the main reason I bought it in the first place.

Take care!

Two weeks with Ubuntufied Oqo O2

I have now spent about 2 weeks with Oqo O2, and most of that time with Ubuntu installed, so I guess it is time for a status update. I'll focus on the Linux issues with the device as other people are raving about how great the Oqo is - like folks over on gottabemobile.com and other places. I agree with all the positive comments, and like to emphasize that it's truly a portable computer - I carry it with me to places I didn't brought my other computers in the past. Which was the main point of buying it.

As I wrote in the previous post on the topic, Ubuntu works on the Oqo O2, and it works great too. As I have mentioned in a previous post, it take some effort to get there, though, but it is worth it. There are also a few things that still does not work, which I will mention further down in the post. But let's start with the stuff that works.

• Wireless network. Oqo O2 have an Atheros chipset for Wifi of the abg-kind. Ubuntu detects and set this up out of the box, using the ath_pci kernel driver. Remark that the restricted-modules kernel add-on must be installed, as the closed source firmware for the radio is in that package. Usually, reception seems to be on the bad side when looking at the bar-chart in the panel that indicates signal strength. But in practice I don't have any problem with the network connection. My guess is that power is turned down a bit to save the battery. But that is just a guess, and I don't know if it is possible to crank up the power in some way. And as I said, it has not been a problem so far.
• Bluetooth works without any problem. It is some kind of chip set attached to the usb bus, it shows up in the output of lsusb -v. The bluetooth support on Linux is still not perfect, like when I wanted to attach the iGo stowaway keyboard, I needed to edit some config files (according to howtos found online) - there is room for improvement. Now, I like to edit those files so it is not a problem for me personally. But it is a problem when it comes to acceptance of Linux among Joe average user.
  
• Keyboard. The Oqo O2 have quite a lot of special keys, which you get by using the Fn function key in combination with other keys. This includes screen brightness and volume adjustments and back lit keyboard. Most of these keys do work Linux. Some keys that don't work are screen rotation and zoom in/out buttons. I don't care much about those things anyway, but being able to remap the keys to something else would have been nice. So far, I haven't figured that out.
  
• Power management. CPU frequency scaling works great in Linux, and so does the speed scaling for the fan. These mean that most of the time I can run on 25% CPU speed and have the fan running on a low speed causing very little noise. And when I need more juice, the system responds quite fast.
• As far as I can tell, the Oqo O2 don't have a speaker. If it is there, I can't turn it on at least. But headphones can be plugged in to hear sound. I installed the audio driver for linux from www.viaarena.com (but not sure it is needed, as it took me a while to realize that I had to plug in headphones). I have not tested stereo bluetooth sound yet, as I don't own such headset yet. But I plan to aquire one such that I can test this - I think this will be a great plus in combination with thje Oqo.
• For graphics, I have tested a few different drivers. I have tested the drivers from viaarena, the OpenChrome driver from openchrome.org, as well as the via-driver in both Ubuntu feisty and Ubuntu gutsy (still in alfa stage). I have so far ended up with the generic vesa driver. There is a description on the ubuntu site on how to install the experimental OpenChrome driver from source. Bottom line is that there are issues with all of them unfortunately. I have to go deeper into this in order to do a proper review - hopefully I can do a separate post on this topic in the near future. What I can say so far is that the vesa driver does not have any dual-head capabilities, the driver from viaarena has (the package even include an application that can be used to enable/disable different outputs like vga, hdmi/tv-out, and enable or disable Xinerama - this works ok). But the computer occasionally went into deep freeze when using the viaarena driver, and it was hard getting back from suspend. The OpenChrome things I tested up to now seems to be the worst of both worlds.
• When it come to suspend/resume, I said in my first post that it works. I have to moderate that statement, unfortunately. Using the regular suspend on the log-off menu in Ubuntu, I can suspend and resume once. If I try to do it twice, the keyboard turn unresponsive, the fan goes to full speed, and the display stays on. Only solution is to press the power button for a while (10 seconds) in order to trigger a hard shutoff. From time to time, I also have to unload and reload the kernel modules for the wireless card to enable wifi after resume. A couple of times the computer also have went into freeze shortly after the first resume. So suspend/resume is really unusable in real life. Which is very very bad as this is very important for my intended use of the Oqo O2. I have had limited success with the s2disk from the uswsusp package (software suspend), which is a kind of hibernation. This only seems to be usable one time. The s2ram application for suspend to ram from the same package does not work on this computer. The hibernation option from the regular log-off menu in Ubuntu does not work either. So, there are a lot of room for improvement here.
• Wacom digitizer does not work. I can not find the device for it and doesn't know whether it is usb based or serial. I have posted a question to support at oqo to see if I can get more information on this. On the other hand, I can live without the pen although I use it a lot on my Fujitsu P1520 (which have the plain touch screen). I get back to this if I make it work or get some information.
  

If we ignore the bad things for a while, the Oqo in Linux is usable as a small, carry around computer. I even booted it and did some work on a turbogears/mysql application in the waiting room at my doctor the other day, using 3G from my Nokia e61i over bluetooth as network connection. But the vesa driver for graphics mean that graphics probably take more power than it should (more work done in the main CPU), and refresh is sluggish when switching between virtual desktops which really is a must on such a small screen. And the suspend/resume issue is more or less a show stopper. Since it takes more than a minute to boot the thing, the opportunity to quickly catch up on email may have passed before I get online. So I have to solve this somehow.

Hope you got some answers to your questions. If not, please use the comments, and I will try to answer (and test if necessary). If you have suggestions for some of the issues, please feel free to post those to - I'm happy to test things out!

Take care!