Ubuntu Gutsy on Thinkpad X61t

Chad Jones, January 2008

1. In general, most things work well. This web site (and links) was helpful to me:


http://luke.no-ip.org/x60tablet/#rotate_script



2. For presentations using an external LCD projector, this works.
To start the presentation after external projector is hooked up:


xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA --auto


To end the presentation:


xrandr --output VGA --off
xrandr --output LVDS --auto

These commands can be placed in a script/applet/whatever.

3. My Sierra Wireless card (MC5725) for WWAN now works. I had one major problem in getting it setup. In general, the instructions here work:


http://www.sierrawireless.com/faq/ShowFAQ.aspx?ID=601


However, my card has a product id of 0220, not 0020 (try the command "lsusb"). The sierra.c module (1.06 or 1.26.b) assumes it is the latter. To fix this, I followed the instructions above but then edited the sierra.c file before compiling (with "make" and "make install" as in the instructions) to change the product id for all mc5725 entries (there were two) to 0220. Before that, my system did not recognize the aircard (no /dev/ttyUSB0 created). After that, it did.

To get it to load with every reboot, I added the following lines to /etc/rc.local


cd /home/chad/Linux/SierraWireless (wherever you did "make")
./make install

I'm sure there's a better way than this, but at least this works.

The only other issue in getting the aircard working was that its radio was off to start with. There are probably other ways to handle this, but I found that using "minicom" was convenient. This is a simple modem program that lets you enter the commands to the modem directly. In particular


at!pcinfo


shows basic info. And to turn the radio on, I used


at!pcstate=1


Other useful commands can be found here:


http://www.anotherurl.com/library/at_test.htm.


The simple "gnome-ppp" worked well for me in getting the aircard working -- it can autodetect my modem once the sierra.c problem is fixed.

3. I've tried both Jarnal and Xournal for marking up PDFs, etc. Xournal seems to do a better job for me of reading all PDFs (e.g. from JStor for academic articles).

4. Things that still do not quite work:


-- Suspend still has the "inu" text appearing, and sometimes crashes.
-- Right palmrest gets much hotter than in Vista.