Brendan Kidwell
28 April 2007
This document is a work in progress and it is not meant to be a comprehensive guide.
I recently decided to dump Windows XP from my Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC and install Ubuntu Linux in its place. Windows XP is slowly creeping towards the end of its useful life, and I am quite uninterested in Windows Vista with all its new restrictions and annoyingly more-restrictive EULA, so I decided it was time to test the viability of Linux as a desktop OS for myself, since I already use it on my personal file server.
I am sharing this information because others might find it useful, but as I already stated, I will not try to be complete. I am mostly documenting things I need to know if I ever have to rebuild this computer the same way again. I won't make a serious effort to be use polished and concise language you hopefully find on the rest of this site. YMMV. Sorry to be blunt, but if you're a newbie you should probably try traditional channels before you ask me for help about anything you find here. If you're an expert, I might be able to help you if you ask a specific question.
I've found these documents helpful:
Specific tips that I didn't create on my own are probably lifted, uncredited, from these sources or others like them.
I didn't have access to a reliable USB-attached CD drive (and this computer has no internal CD/DVD drive), and this was the only installation method I could get to work. Download netboot/boot.img.gz from an Ubuntu mirror extract it to a thumbdrive and boot from that. (Directly onto the storage device, not into a filesystem.)
Grub got installed wrong. If boot fails, boot from thumbdrive again and run grub-install and make sure /boot/grub/menu.1st on the target partition has options configured to boot from ”(hd0,0)”:
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=b46a36ce-dde8-4baf-a27a-7aada8c7bf6f ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic quiet savedefault title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic (recovery mode) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=b46a36ce-dde8-4baf-a27a-7aada8c7bf6f ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic title Ubuntu, memtest86+ root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin quiet
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
+ Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
+ Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
EndSection
Create file /etc/acpi/resume.d/20-setserial.sh mode 755 owner root:root :
#!/bin/bash /bin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 port 0x0200 irq 5 autoconfig
Password Gorilla is an excellent multi-platform password manager with basic merging capability that allows you to store an encrypted password list on all your different computers and occasionally try to sync them up.
Get Password Gorilla from http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/#Download. chown it to root:root and put it in /usr/bin.
Get TclKit from http://www.equi4.com/tclkit/ (follow link to “download matrix”) and get the appropriate binary. Extract and rename this to /usr/bin/tclkit, owned by root:root, and make it executable.
Make a Launcher in your desktop pointing to
tclkit /usr/bin/gorilla-[VERSION].kit
Install packages bluez-gnome and gnome-bluetooth.