Thanks to those heroes out there …
… for getting Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Linux ready to run on my sweet little Dell Latitude XT. Things still were a total mess half a year ago when I go this sexy thing. Vista was preinstalled and drove me crazy with the famous Blue-Screen-of-Death, caused by crappy video drivers. I really wanted this tablet thing and was even ready to go back to Vista, despite some happy years with Ubuntu and my old Thinkpad 41p. Back to Vista, life sucked again, so at the end of 2008 I was ready to go back, even if not all of the features of this laptop should be working under Linux. The first attempt to roll out linux on this machine was with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and many things, including the wireless device, let alone my UMTS (G3) mobile broadband, did not work. Most importantly, there were no drivers for the N-TRIG touch screen, which was the reason why I wanted this laptop in the first place. It is really hand to review papers on a tablet PC and make annotations directly in the PDF with PDFAnnotator.
So, things simply weren’t as they should have been.
But I was not hopeless. Googling for the usual keywords revealed that a couple of heroes out there were working on it. Rene Mayrhofer‘s page on getting to run Ubuntu on the Latitude XT was the first I found. He is continuously updating his page with the latest developments and when I was ready to give Ubuntu a new go at the beginning of the new year, his page revealed that most my problems were solved. The best news was that Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex essentially had solved all the wireless and broadband issues and indeed, after an upgrade of my existing Hardy Heron, both the wireless as well as, to my greatest delight, the mobile broadband, worked out of the box and where supported by Ubuntu’s nice NetworkManager applet.
Additionally, Rene and rafi at ofb.net had found out how to patch the xorg wacom driver to work with the N-TRIG panel. Using Rene’s binary of rafi’s patch I can now use either Xournal or Jarnal to annotate my pdf’s again.
The most credits, of course, go to the Ubuntu team for making this distro available and for keeping is cutting-edge all the time.
Categorised as: Life of Chris, Open Source
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