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.

I for one have no particular problems with the fact that Nessus has gone to a closed source model from version 3, with the exception that this means I can’t run Nessus on some of my platforms of choice (ie, Gentoo Linux). However, since a package is available for Debian 3.x, I wondered if it would work on Ubuntu. This didn’t prove too difficult - I expect because Ubuntu is based on Debian 3.x and also because the Nessus developers have historically bundled their own versions of libraries to prevent library dependency issues (that seems to be the usual reason for not being able to install Debian packages on Ubuntu for me).

The install itself is fairly self explanatory:

1. Download the Debian package (Nessus-3.0.0-debian3_i386.deb) from http://www.nessus.org/download/. This will involve signing up to download the binary – the e-mail they send you will allow you to register the plugin feed, allowing access to all the new plugins Tenable write after a 7 day delay.
2. Install the package using dpkg. This will install the package into the /opt/nessus/ directory:
   • sudo dpkg -i Nessus-3.0.0-debian3_i386.deb
3. The install will perform several of the steps that you would have previously done manually – eg, it will add the nessus directory into the /etc/ld.so.conf file so that the libraries will load.
4. Add in your admin user using the /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-add-first-user script. This is a bit different from how it was previously done – you add the first user this way, and then add extra users using the more familiar /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-adduser script.
5. Break open your e-mail, and paste in the command line supplied to register your plugin feed.
6. Start the nessus daemon:
   • /opt/nessus/sbin/nessusd –D

If you have a problem with the Nessus daemon not starting (or aborting when starting), try running /opt/nessus/sbin/nessusd -R and then restarting the dameon.

There are some other difference in the new versions, it is well worth a peruse of the documentation. One of the major differences is that there is no longer a GUI client supplied with the package – this has been split into a separate NessusClient package that you will also need to download from http://www.nessus.org/download/, and compile and install yourself. The command line client, however, is supplied with the binary package.

Enjoy!

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.