Update on Stybba
In a previous post, I describe my trials and tribulations with the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution (Gutsy Gibbon) and my older tablet PC, Stybba. 
melstav suggested dropping back to the 6.06 release (Dapper Drake). Since Gutsy Gibbon had failed so miserably, and the PC-BSD distribution as well, I took the advicet.
Dapper Drake booted up smoothly, installed with no problems, and I'm currently making this entry via the Scribefire plugin for Firefox. The 6.06 distribution came bundled with Firefox 1.5, so I immediately upgraded to 2.0.12, using these instructions from the Ubuntu community site.
So far, so good. The performance issues I had with GG are gone; Stybba is responding fine. Things got sluggish last night when I had about seven tabs open, including one for Daily Kos and another for iGoogle. dKos was extremely active because it was election night, so that combined with iGoogle's regular updating slowed things down a bit. I backed off on the content open and things went back to normal.
I've also revisited Scribefire as a blogging environment, but that'll be the subject of a separate entry.
While Stybba functions nicely as a basic PC under DD, I still haven't gotten the tablet functions to work properly yet. Using insight from here and here, I installed wacom-tools and the rest of the suggested packages and reconfigured X11 for the tablet screen and stylus.
When I re-booted the system, my first problem was that I didn't properly close one of the configuration sections in xorg.conf, so the entire desktop blew up. I fixed that from the command line, rebooted, and still no tablet functionality. Here are the mods I made to xorg.conf:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
</lj>
Simply pasting this in blew up X11, I'm assuming because the last Section doesn't have an EndSection. I added that from a command-line edit, and things came back fine.
I also added a line to "Startup Programs" on the desktop per the blog:
I assumed that the period at the end of the line was for punctuation and not part of the add, so I didn't put it.
Still, no tablet goodness yet. If anyone's got suggestions, I'd appreciate the input.
melstav suggested dropping back to the 6.06 release (Dapper Drake). Since Gutsy Gibbon had failed so miserably, and the PC-BSD distribution as well, I took the advicet. Dapper Drake booted up smoothly, installed with no problems, and I'm currently making this entry via the Scribefire plugin for Firefox. The 6.06 distribution came bundled with Firefox 1.5, so I immediately upgraded to 2.0.12, using these instructions from the Ubuntu community site.
So far, so good. The performance issues I had with GG are gone; Stybba is responding fine. Things got sluggish last night when I had about seven tabs open, including one for Daily Kos and another for iGoogle. dKos was extremely active because it was election night, so that combined with iGoogle's regular updating slowed things down a bit. I backed off on the content open and things went back to normal.
I've also revisited Scribefire as a blogging environment, but that'll be the subject of a separate entry.
While Stybba functions nicely as a basic PC under DD, I still haven't gotten the tablet functions to work properly yet. Using insight from here and here, I installed wacom-tools and the rest of the suggested packages and reconfigured X11 for the tablet screen and stylus.
When I re-booted the system, my first problem was that I didn't properly close one of the configuration sections in xorg.conf, so the entire desktop blew up. I fixed that from the command line, rebooted, and still no tablet functionality. Here are the mods I made to xorg.conf:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
</lj>
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "stylus"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS4"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "eraser"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS4"
Option "Type" "eraser"
Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "cursor"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS4"
Option "Type" "cursor"
Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
Simply pasting this in blew up X11, I'm assuming because the last Section doesn't have an EndSection. I added that from a command-line edit, and things came back fine.
I also added a line to "Startup Programs" on the desktop per the blog:
8.Now on the top panel click on System> Preferences> Sessions> Startup Programs
Click "Add" to paste the following string /usr/X11R6/bin/./xinput set-button-map stylus 1 3 2 4.
I assumed that the period at the end of the line was for punctuation and not part of the add, so I didn't put it.
Still, no tablet goodness yet. If anyone's got suggestions, I'd appreciate the input.
