ThroughTheLens

As mentioned before, Jaunty has been running very well and fine on my Thinkpad X200. While surfing on Hardwarezone the other day, I saw an ad putting an x60 tablet for sale. In the end, I traded in my Thinkpad X41 Tablet for a 2nd hand X60 Tablet - main advantage being that the X60 tablet has a 1400×1050screen resolution - even more than my x200.

Anyway, the initial install and stuff went pretty ok, with the stylus being recognised immediatley and all. But the problem started when I tried to do screen rotation on my tablet. Firstly, I realised that instructions online that tweaked the xorg.conf file didnt work anymore because Ubuntu has changed the way it configured hardware, using fdi xml-formatted files instead. Anyway,here is the exact steps I did to get screen rotation to work:

Steps

1. Clean install of Jaunty on x60
2. apt-get install wacom-tools
3. Download this script http://liken.otsoa.net/pub/x41t/rotatetablet and save it to /usr/local/bin/rotate
4. chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/rotate
5. sudo vi /etc/init.d/wacomtohal

and paste in these lines:

#! /bin/sh

## find any wacom devices
for udi in `hal-find-by-property –key input.x11_driver –string wacom`
do
type=`hal-get-property –udi $udi –key input.x11_options.Type`
## rewrite the names that the Xserver will use
hal-set-property –udi $udi –key info.product –string $type
done

Save it, close it, and run these two commands in terminal:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/wacomtohal
sudo update-rc.d wacomtohal defaults 27

Explanation

Step (4) is to create an auto-run script that changes some values in HAL in Jaunty so that the wacom device in thinkpad tablet can be seen by the rotate script. Somehow in Jaunty, the way wacom devices are named in HAL is diferent.  So, the script wacomtohal changes it so that the rotate script works.  If you didn’t run this, the rotate script in Step (3) would rotate the screen only and have the error message xsetwacom device “stylus” not found. The stylus would not rotate, resulting in a case of all stylus positions being rotated 90 degree off centre.  It took a full re-installation to get this right becuase there are so many instructions online telling you what to do with different versions of Ubuntu.

References

Init.d script:  http://wordsarelies.blogspot.com/2009/05/ubuntu-904-jaunty-on-thinkpad-x41.html
Rotation script: http://liken.otsoa.net/blog/index.php?entry=entry080617-120522