justinclarke.com

General

As part of my job, I found myself installing Ubuntu Linux onto a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 Tablet PC (model CF-18FDHZBVE). This model comes in two versions - one with a touchscreen (i.e. you can use your finger) and one with an active digitizer (i.e. you need the pen). The digitizer model is the one in this article.

This machine is being built as a triple boot system with Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux (5.10 - "Breezy Badger"), and FreeBSD 5.4 for wireless security testing. For reference, due to the triple boot requirement, this is how the partitioning was done using Linux fdisk:

• /dev/hda1 30G NTFS (Windows XP)
• /dev/hda2 200M Ext3 /boot
• /dev/hda3 10G UFS (FreeBSD)
• /dev/hda5 2G Swap
• /dev/hda6 18G Ext3 /

And here is the proof of the pudding - using the digitizer to sketch in GIMP:

Installation

Installation was rather smooth as I had the external USB DVD/CD drive for the machine (the CF-VDRRT3). A standard install of Ubuntu 5.10 was put on the machine, with the exception of the non-standard partitioning.

Graphic Card

The graphic card is integrated into the Intel 855GM chipset. This is supported by the i915/i810 drivers out of the box. Rotation using XRandR is not supported out of the box with this driver, however there appear to be some patches that I have not tried yet that allow this - you can find a link here. If a permanent rotation is wanted, you can add Option "Rotate" "CW" or "CCW" to the Device section of your xorg.conf for clockwise or counter-clockwise rotation of the picture in X (see below). You will also need to set the input devices in X to the same rotation mode - read the wacom(4) man page for how to do this.

Note that this configuration is for the Active Digitizer version of this model. For the Touchscreen version, you could try the commercial X server from Xi Graphics here.

Xorg

The essential parts in /etc/X11/xorg.conf are:

   Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier  "Wacom Digitizer"
       Driver      "wacom"
       Option      "Type" "stylus"
       Option      "Device" "/dev/ttyS25"
       Option      "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
   EndSection

   Section "Device"
       ### Available Driver options are:-
       Identifier  "Card0"
       Driver      "i810"
       VendorName  "Intel Corp."
       BoardName   "82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
       BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
       
       # Enable to Rotate the Display Clockwise
       #Option "Rotate" "CW"
   EndSection

   Section "ServerLayout"
       ... add in the following line ...
       InputDevice "Wacom Digitizer" "SendCoreEvents"
       ... end of additions ...
   EndSection

Pen - Wacom Active Digitizer

The pen digitizer is a serial Wacom digitizer. This has an unusual serial port on my machine, however it was picked up by Ubuntu as /dev/ttyS25, on port 0x0148 and irq 4, and autoconfigured successfully. I found this by looking through the dmesg output as the machine has no other serial ports. This can be tested by installing the wacom-tools package, and running the following (as root):

wacdump -f c100 /dev/ttyS25

If everything is working, you should get position and button press status reported by this tool.

USB

Works out of the box.

Ethernet controller

Works out of the box with the 8139too driver that ships with Ubuntu 5.10.

Wireless LAN

Works out of the box with the ipw2200 driver that ships with Ubuntu 5.10.

Internal Modem

Not tested or setup as of yet.

PCMCIA adapter

Works out of the box.

Bluetooth

Works out of the box.