Please be aware that I know nothing about wireless hardware, so anything may go wrong when you use this code. I cannot give any guarantees.

Here’s a patch if you want to compile their driver against the Natty kernel 2.6.38:

=== modified file 'os/linux/cfg80211.c'
--- os/linux/cfg80211.c    2011-09-23 23:00:46 +0000
+++ os/linux/cfg80211.c    2011-09-23 23:01:08 +0000
@@ -675,7 +675,7 @@
 */
 static int CFG80211_TxPwrSet(
     IN struct wiphy                        *pWiphy,
-    IN enum tx_power_setting            Type,
+    IN enum nl80211_tx_power_setting            Type,
     IN int                                dBm)
 {
     return -EOPNOTSUPP;

Here’s an addititional patch if you want to compile it against the Oneiric kernel 3.0.0 (note that you need BOTH of the patches for oneiric):

=== modified file 'os/linux/cfg80211.c'
--- os/linux/cfg80211.c    2011-09-23 23:01:08 +0000
+++ os/linux/cfg80211.c    2011-09-23 23:10:47 +0000
@@ -2059,7 +2059,7 @@
         pChan->band = IEEE80211_BAND_2GHZ;
     /* End of if */
 
-    pChan->center_freq = ieee80211_channel_to_frequency(ChanId);
+    pChan->center_freq = ieee80211_channel_to_frequency(ChanId, pChan->band);
 
 #if (LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,32))
     if (pAd->CommonCfg.PhyMode >= PHY_11ABGN_MIXED)
@@ -2620,7 +2620,8 @@
     for(IdLoop=0; IdLoop<NumOfChan; IdLoop++)
     {
         pChannels[IdLoop].center_freq = \
-                    ieee80211_channel_to_frequency(Cfg80211_Chan[IdLoop]);
+                    ieee80211_channel_to_frequency(Cfg80211_Chan[IdLoop],
+                               (IdLoop<CFG80211_NUM_OF_CHAN_2GHZ)?IEEE80211_BAND_2GHZ:IEEE80211_BAND_5GHZ);
         pChannels[IdLoop].hw_value = IdLoop;
 
         if (IdLoop < CFG80211_NUM_OF_CHAN_2GHZ)

I described my early experience with the HP Touchsmart tm2 – 2000ed in my earlier post. Here’s some updated info: since my last post, a lot of Linux developer’s have made the experience even more pleasant.

Graphics drivers

Ubuntu Maverick has some issues because the two graphics devices interfere with each other. It turns out to be very easy to turn the Radeon driver off at startup:

echo blacklist radeon | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-radeon.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u

Alternatively, you could install all packages from the Radeon xorg-edgers ppa. Their new xserver-xorg-video-ati version does not seem to have these problems. You will also notice that it works a lot faster with 3d applications (I tested with flightgear). It says on the lauchpad page that you need a 2.6.36 kernel for this to work, but for me it is running fine on stock Maverick 2.6.35. Caution: this driver is still under heavy development. For example, my external monitor does not work and there’s problems with material shaders in flightgear.

Backlight bug

There’s still a bug that sometimes the backlight does not come on when you start your computer. Here’s the bugreport. In the comments to my last post, Mike noted that you can just close and open the lid, and the backlight comes back on.

Trackpad multi-touch

Install the synaptics-dkms (version 1.1.1) package from this bugreport. The clickpad button will still not work, but at least you have second and third mousebuttons with two and three finger taps.

Update January 10, 2011: Read my latest post for some updates.

Encouraged by this post I recently bought HP’s tablet PC the “touchsmart tm2-2000″ and installed Maverick on it. The support has been improved since Brian’s post so I thought I’d share my experience.

The biggest improvement is that touch, multi-touch and the pen now work out of the box. The only thing that is a bit awkward is that when you rotate the screen display, the touch and pen input forget to rotate along. I made a small program that monitors screen rotation and rotates these input devices accordingly. I hope that others can benefit so here’s install instructions (type the following into a terminal):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tkluck/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wacomrotator

There’s still a bug that sometimes the backlight does not come on when you start your computer. That’s pretty bad because the screen is really unreadable when the backlight is off. Here’s the bugreport. My workaround for now is to rotate the screen when this happens; for some reason this makes the backlight come on.

Another thing I noticed was that the pen input seemed to be shaky when you have closed the lid with the screen in front (‘tablet mode’). It turns out that the back of the screen accidently triggers the touchpad. You can just disable the touchpad to work around this. Actually, the script above already does this when you rotate the screen display (because I only and always rotate the display when going into tablet mode).

Also, multi-touch on the trackpad does not work out of the box. You can tweak the settings of the Synaptics driver to do this. Put the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-two-finger-scroll-touchsmart-tm2.conf

Section "InputClass"
   Identifier "enable synaptics SHMConfig" 
   MatchIsTouchpad "on"  
   MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
   Driver "synaptics"
   Option "SHMConfig" "on"
   Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinW" "5"
   Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" "60"
   Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
   Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
EndSection

(I got these tips from this bugreport). The driver seems to forget these settings once in a while; I think gnome-settings-mouse interferes. If I found out what to do about it, I’ll edit here. For now, I just type this into a command line whenever scrolling stops working:

synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1

Maverick now ships with the vga_switcheroo module compiled into the kernel. That means that you can actually choose whether you want to use the ATi or the Intel videocard. The drivers for the latter seem to work better, so I chose that one. I put the line

echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

into /etc/rc.local to turn of the ATi card. That saves a lot of battery!

What you should most definitely do is install Xournal (it’s in the Ubuntu Software Center) by Denis Auroux. It is a note-taking application that lets you write in a notebook with the pen. There’s also a very useful patch by Rumen Zarev that gives you the option to ignore touch. Of course Ubuntu always ignores touch when the pen is near the screen, but you also don’t want to draw accidental lines when you rest your hand on the screen. I put a patched package into my ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tkluck/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xournal