Debian GNU/Linux on the Portege M200 Tablet PC

This is an addendum to the other reports listed at Tuxmobil - Toshiba.

Stylus

The "thumb" button of the stylus is the middle mouse button per default which was changed to the right mouse button with the option "Button2" set to "3" in the section InputDevice of the "stylus" type of the driver wacom.

xstroke was installed, but has some problems with the autostart feature of the GNOME session manager: sometimes it autostarts, sometimes it does not.

For Gimp2 to become pressure-sensitive on your strokes, you have to open its settings and choose the input devices (the top level item; in the german version are two items with the same name). There you can configure the extended input devices and you can choose any of the three stylus devices configured in xorg.conf. Set their mode to "screen" and you can start painting with soft and hard touches on the screen.

Screen Orientation

Opposed to the configuration of two X-servers running simultaneously to provide two different orientations, the XRandR extension is used here to switch. The driver nv from x.org does not support rotation on-the-fly, so nvidia is used which has the option "RandRRotation" set to "true" in the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Another advantage is that you gain excellent 3D performance, with the downside that Suspend-To-Disk is broken, when it worked with the old driver. Perhaps it needs more than two hours to properly configure that beast for suspension.

With that driver, you can use the gnome-randr-applet to change the orientation. Alas, it was not found out how to change the orientation of the mouse accordingly. So the touchpad is configured to work correctly in landscape mode and the stylus to work correctly in portrait mode.

Screen Hotkeys

The screen hotkeys are to be handled differently than the Fn hotkeys. They generate valid scancodes on the console and events when trying with xev in X11. Perhaps, it is needed to add "Super is mapped to the Win-keys (default)" in the layout settings of the gnome-keyboard-properties. It used to be like that, but at the moment it is not necessary anymore for some unknown reason.

The button with the "key" generates ctrl-alt-del and can be configured with the gnome-keybinding-properties to do a proper logout.

The button with the "switching screen" is more difficult to configure, since a command for screen rotation is not included in the aforementioned GNOME program. but with gconf-editor you can set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 to "<Mod4>6" to get the key and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 to "/usr/local/bin/switch_orientation". You can use this shell script for switching. It calls xrandr for querying the current rotation and sets the orientation accordingly.

The joystick is another story: It generates the same keycodes as the keys from 1 to 5. So the shell script was extended to run xmodmap to setup the joystick as keypad left, right, top, down, enter when switching to portrait mode and to set it back to 1-5 (plus all the modifiers) when switching to landscape mode. The keypad configuration enables the joystick to be used as normal arrowkeys or as mousekeys when enabled by the accessX extension of X11, e.g. via the GNOME accessibility keyboard settings.

Other Resources

• Linux on Tablet PCs
• Linux Mobile Guide - Installing, Maintaining and Tuning of Linux on Mobile Computers
• Debian Laptop Proposal

Credits

• Sebastian Henschel