The Sopebocks

I’m starting a new project. What is JORSnix, you ask? It’s Linux for Tablet PCs. Windows has the monopoly on Tablet PCs, and that sucks, because besides that, Linux is wonderful for students. And so are tablets.

For those of you who don’t follow my blog, I own a Lenovo X61 Tablet. It’s my pride and joy, and I take it everywhere. It weighs under four pounds, has excellent battery life (or.. well.. used to..), and of course it’s also a tablet, so I can take notes in class on it.

So what is JORSnix going to be? It’s going to be based on Ubuntu, and loosely modelled around their release schedule. If they do something that screws up tablet support for a release, we’ll notify our users and skip it.

In short: we’re going to make it easy for you to use your tablet efficiently with Linux. That’s the goal, anyway.

We plan on packaging a lightweight system with Gnome (maybe one of the *box WMs later), Xournal, CellWriter, EasyStroke, and wacom-tools. We’ll make all of the buttons work and make your laptop usable in Tablet Mode without a keyboard.

But for now, we’re just going to support Lenovo X61 Tablets because that’s all we have, but hopefully it will work on other tablets with little tweaking. Both HP and Fujitsu use similar Wacom backends, so if I don’t do anything too Lenovo-specific, it’ll be OK. Anyway. This is the birth of something good. If you read this and you’re willing to test, especially if you have a different tablet than me, please, please contact me.

Linux has many different communities, some better than others. The Ubuntu Forums’ biggest problem is the blind leading the blind, with plenty of people who know just enough to get you into trouble helping other folks, but at least they are mostly friendly.

But this isn’t true of every community. The “expert distributions” are full of dickheads and weirdos, and it’s a big turnoff to a lot of us “advanced users.” I’ll hit three that I’ve used, and strayed from.

Gentoo:

First, Gentoo, because I used Gentoo for about a year. Besides the fact that compiling your own system is inefficient and makes little sense (no, it’s really not any faster), the community is full of douchebags. I knew one of these folks personally, and he thought he knew a lot more than he did. If you asked him for help, ever, he’d tell you to learn to use Google. I know how to use Google, you ass.

The problem with this sentiment is that yes, I can spend hours poring over man pages looking for what I want to know, but if you know how to do it, it’ll take you five seconds to tell me. Not to mention that Portage is the shittiest package manager I’ve ever seen. Portage isn’t even a package manager, it’s a file structure, make, and tar. Mostly, it doesn’t do any dependency checks besides installations.

Let’s say I install Firefox, and Firefox depends on GTK. So Portage pulls in Firefox and GTK when you install Firefox, but then if you decide to uninstall GTK, it doesn’t warn you or anything that Firefox still needs it. Sure, this isn’t a big problem when you have two packages, but if you do a file install that requires a hundred packages, and for some reason one gets removed, then software will mysteriously stop working. And tracking down the problem takes fraking Sherlock Holmes. So what did I do, to keep Gentoo running for a year? I stopped updating, and I never removed anything.

Fuck. That.

Archlinux:

Next is Archlinux. I didn’t use Archlinux for long, probably only for a day or two. Archlinux has many of the same problems as Gentoo. I went into #archlinux and asked a simple question that would have taken me awhile to find in the man pages, but that I knew had a one-command answer. About four people told me to RTFM and one told me the information. That’s a 4:1 douchebag to person ratio. I’d rather use Mac.

Not to mention that when I asked about PulseAudio, which I have always had good luck with, and instead of helping me fix it, I got told to just use ALSA because Pulse sucks. I didn’t ask what I should use, I asked how to use Pulse. I like Pulse. So I ripped it off the hard drive fast enough that I can’t complainabout how Pacman doesn’t properly handle the rolling releases and how shit breaks all the time because of that. Which is what I’ve been told. But I don’t know if that’s true or not.

Sidux:

The most recent one is Sidux. With Sidux, I have managed to tread softly with the community, but they aren’t the friendliest folks. They have a tendency to give you canned responses via the bot in #sidux, if you don’t show that you’ve already been working on the problem on your own for several hours. But mostly I want to complain about the package managers. They must be asleep at the switch. You have to enable the testing repository to install fucking GIMP, because simply typing apt-get install gimp breaks apt-get, because one of it was compiled with a testing version of one of its dependencies, so you can’t get it without getting the testing one. What. the fuck. And it’s not easy to tell which dependency is having a problem, and since this happens to me every few packages, I’m just done with the entire distribution. I can’t use a distribution with a broken package manager.

And I don’t know about Debian, but I’ve heard that the Debian crowd is just as elitist as Sidux, and Gentoo, and Archlinux. You do not dare suggest that something with their precious distribution could be improved, or you get flamed and hated. And this is why they all suck. No criticism means no improvement.

So good riddance. I’ll go back to one of my “newbie distributions,” where I don’t have to spend half my time fixing my computer and getting flamed. Thanks.

This is my desktop; You can see the similarities to my laptop. Similar Conky, both running Openbox. The panel is different though. Maybe more info later, but just a relatively uninformative screenshot for now.

Just wanted to post a screenshot.  New distro, beautiful desktop. Actually laptop. But you know. There will be screenshots of Sidux too. More of them, because my Crunchbang install is near-default.

Yeah that’s right. I updated to Ubuntu 9.04. That’s kind of a lie, I actually moved to Crunchbang 9.04, but it’s all the same under the hood. The move to evdev-based devices is giving me a headache. You may have noticed that the pen works out of the box, but I need the eraser to be able to efficiently take notes in Xournal, and this took some work. First of all, let’s get middle-click scrolling working the new way.

Middle-click scrolling, this is a summary and repost of this blog.
Do this to create mouse-wheel.fdi:

sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi

Copy in this:

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
</match>

Now we’ll go ahead and set up your tablet.

sudo apt-get install wacom-tools
sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/custom-wacom.fdi

And assuming you have an x61 Tablet like myself, copy this in:
Remember that this should work for anyone with a serial Wacom backend, but specifically Lenovo x61 and x200 Tablets

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->

<deviceinfo version="0.2">

 <device>
 <match key="input.x11_driver" contains="wacom">
 <match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="stylus">
 </match>
 </match>
 <match key="input.x11_driver" contains="wacom">
 <match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="eraser">
 </match>
 </match>
 <match key="input.x11_driver" contains="wacom">
 <match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="cursor">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">Absolute</merge>
 </match>
 </device>

</deviceinfo>

If you have an x61 or x200 Tablet, you need to set up this script to run on boot written by Roger Critchlow Jr.

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/wacom

Copy the script into that file:

#!/bin/bash
# find any wacom devices
for udi in `hal-find-by-property --key input.x11_driver --string wacom`
do
type=`hal-get-property --udi $udi --key input.x11_options.Type`
# rewrite the names that the Xserver will use
hal-set-property --udi $udi --key info.product --string $type
case $type in
stylus|eraser)
# map stylus button 2 to mouse button 3
hal-set-property --udi $udi --key input.x11_options.Button2 --string 3
;;
esac
done

Set it executable.

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/wacom

Create symbolic links into the right places so that it starts at the right time:

sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/wacom /etc/rc5.d/S27wacom
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/wacom /etc/rc4.d/S27wacom
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/wacom /etc/rc3.d/S27wacom
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/wacom /etc/rc2.d/S27wacom

Finally, you have to add one more line to another file:

NOTICE: This final step might be unnecessary. I’m not sure. Feedback would be wonderful.

sudo gedit /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-wacom.fdi

Find:

<match key="info.capabilities" contains="serial">

Under it, find:

<append key="wacom.types" type="strlist">eraser</append>

Add:

<append key="wacom.types" type="strlist">cursor</append>

And that’s it. All of the other settings are the same so this post should finish up the setup.

I made a few small typos on Day 1. Hopefully you smart folks figured them out/noticed them. I think they are fixed now. Also discovered a few places where WordPress replaced my straight quotes with curly quotes. Everything is copy-and-paste-able now. My apologies!