Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on Acer Travelmate C110

It's thin, it's light. It's a tablet. / 2006-10-18

Through an inheritance I'm now a proud owner of an thin, light Acer Travelmate C110. I've always been a big fan of the sleek laptop, but not yet had a chance to give the tablet a chance. So far so good.

There's nothing cooler than a really small machine running linux. This is a collection of notes from the install, setup, and tweaking of the system running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake). It's admittedly a little over verbose.

The system

- Intel Pentium M at 900MHz
- 500MB DDR SDRAM
- 10.4" display (TFT) running at an impressive 1024x768
- 40GB IDE
- Firewire CDRW/DVD
- 80211.b internal

Installing Ubuntu

The BIOS recognizes the external firewire CD drive that comes with the machine. You may need to go in and change the boot order - which was my method - or you may be able to F12 to the boot menu on start.

The Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Live CD / Installer (downloadable here) boots without any issues. An icon on the desktop (Install) walks you through a very short install. I had the partitioner take over the whold drive - although it is easy to have it keep Windows Tablet for the dual boot.

The beautiful thing about Ubuntu is that it works well out-of-the-box and has integrated the godsend that is the Apt package manager. After the installer CD has completed and after a quick reboot you're about ready to go. Sound, network, and even the wireless works without modification.

You'll be prompted if you're connected to the internet for an installation of Ubuntu updates. Do this.

Setup and tweaking

Tablet features

The tablet features are supported by the wacom-tools package (thanks to James Dodd for these notes). In a terminal:

sudo apt-get install wacom-tools

Add the following line to /etc/rc.local

setserial /dev/ttyS0 port 0x06f8 irq 6 autoconfigure

Notetaking

I haven't had the chance to test out more than a couple of apps (there aren't that many), but Gournal seems to get the job done. This isn't found in the repositories that are selected by default - the easiest way to add the extras is through synaptic:

sudo synaptic

And add the extras through Settings -> Repositories

Then you can search for gournal and install through synaptic, or you could:

sudo apt-get install Gournal

OSK

There's a bunch of on screen keyboards out there - the best I've found so far is xvkbd:

sudo apt-get install xvkbd

flash player

The package flashplayer-nonfree does not work - but Adobe's installer works well. When you try a site with flash you'll be prompted to download the plugin. Follow the directions and restart Mozilla.