justinclarke.com

General

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 on the Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 Tablet PC (model CF-18FDHZBVE) that I had previously installed Ubuntu 5.10 on (you can find that writeup here). 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.

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 6.10 was put on the machine. The only difficulty installing was I had to connect a USB mouse as the Synaptic touch pad was selecting a region of the screen rather than moving the cursor. This doesn't affect me much as I usually use the pen as the pointer, however I am trying to figure out what causes this.

Graphic Card

The graphic card is integrated into the Intel 855GM chipset. This is supported by the i915/i810 drivers out of the box. Apparently (according the the X server logs) XRandR is now supported out of the box with this driver which would allow screen rotation, however I have not as yet got this configured.

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 as follows. The only change I made was to change the wacom device from /dev/wacom to /dev/ttyS0:

   Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier  "stylus"
       Driver      "wacom"
       Option      "Type" "stylus"
       Option      "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
       Option      "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
   EndSection

   Section "ServerLayout"
       ...
       InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
       ...
   EndSection

Pen - Wacom Active Digitizer

The pen digitizer is a serial Wacom digitizer. This was configured at the /dev/ttyS0 serial port on my machine 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/ttyS0

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

Synaptic Touchpad

The touchpad does not seem to be detected correctly by Ubuntu. It is detected as a PS/2 mouse in the kernel, however the Xorg synaptic driver does not seem to detect the touchpad correctly. The result is that using the touchpad seems to default to selecting a region of the screen (i.e. a tap-drag) as opposed to moving the cursor.

The touchpad is, however, correctly detected by tpconfig so I am continuing to look into getting this working properly. In the interim I recommend using an external mouse when inside, and the pen when outside.

Note - I got an email a while back from a Pasi Patama who pointed me towards this link at linuxquestions which apparently solves this problem. I haven't tested this as I no longer have access to this machine.

USB

Works out of the box.

Ethernet controller

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

Wireless LAN

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

Internal Modem

Not tested or setup as of yet.

PCMCIA adapter

Works out of the box.

Bluetooth

Works out of the box.