Acer TravelMate C100 in Fedora: Stylus and Tablet, more

I'm going to document a bit more my trials in getting the Acer TravelMate C100 working tablet working in Fedora. I'll break it up by sections and update just this One post.

X

X changed how they handle PCI and now the Silicon Motion driver is broken for this tablet's Lynx 3DM SM712 card. For this you will need an updated Silicon Motion driver! Here is the source for 1.7.0 which fixes whether to use the BIOS, some initialisation, and acceleration issues. Yay 1.7.0. Francisco Jerez was wonderfully helpful. Bug documenting the issue is on Freedesktop bug 18816.

If you do not feel comfortable building the new driver and its few dependencies, you might want to wait until Fedora releases an updated one! Or, you can bug me and I will package it.

Tablet

The new X tries to use HAL to autoconfigure your devices. It tries to make do without an /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file. It did not autoconfigure my tablet. So, as root I let it create a base xorg.conf (once I had X working at all from the step above) using

# X -configure

which created a new xorg.conf in /root/ which I copied to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and added:

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Identifier      "Stylus0" 
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option          "Type"          "stylus"
        Option          "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
#       Option          "Button2"       "3"  # makes side-button right click instead of middle
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Identifier      "Eraser0"
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option          "Type"          "eraser"
        Option          "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Identifier      "Cursor0"
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option          "Type"          "cursor"
        Option          "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

I also made this changed the X Server layout section to this:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Stylus0" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Cursor0" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Eraser0" "SendCoreEvents"

        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

The next time I started X, the stylus worked :)

Suspend and Sleep

Hibernate worked automatically for me. However, the Acer TravelMate C100 would not come out of suspend to RAM for me. Well, it came out, the video would just be blank and slowly bleed across the screen :( To fix this for me, I have to enable the vbe_post quirk for HAL. To do this for the system, I made two changes to

/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi 

which defines the quirks for Acer's video.

First, I changed the 4th line (vendor) from this:

    <match key="system.hardware.vendor" prefix="Acer">

to this

    <match key="system.hardware.vendor" prefix_ncase="Acer">

because this Acer model is reported is lshal as being ACER instead of Acer, and the change lets it match case insensitively.

The second change I made was to enable the vbe_post quirk for the C100 as well as the 6460. So, I changed line 24 (the one that matches 6460) from this:

        <match key="system.hardware.product" contains="6460">

to this

        <match key="system.hardware.product" contains_outof="C100;6460">

This issue with patch is at Redhat bug 478369

Audio

I have to use the

$ alsaunmute

command from the command-line to get the audio correctly initialised often. I haven't really pursued this much as I think my soundcard is having hardware issues anyway.

Wireless

The built-in wireless works out of the box for me. The sad part is, though, the button to switch between the wireless card and the wired ethernet seems to only work at boot (like, when GRUB is up). So, I have to reboot if I want to switch modes.

I'll note that the Acer Hotkeys system (acerhk) mentions code for enabling the wlan_button from Christian Roessner but their link appears to be dead.

Hotkeys

Building and compiling Acer Hotkeys (acerhk) still works for me for enabling volume and suspend Fn keys :)

Other

There are other things that I may have forgotten or not bothered about if they weren't important to me. If you want me to try something or have any questions, please comment or e-mail me. My e-mail address is on the front page.

Acer TravelMate C100, a sleeping beauty

I own an Acer TravelMate C100 tablet PC. I recently installed Fedora 10 on it. While resuming from suspend worked under Ubuntu, it did not under Fedora 10. Following Richard Hughes' quirks, I discovered that I could resume from suspend when suspending with the vbe_post quirk.

So, from the command-line:

$ pm-suspend --quirk-vbe-post

And from HAL:

hal-set-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer --key power_management.quirk.vbe_post --bool true

While I should be able to add an entry to /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi to make this quirk permanent for HAL, that does not appear to be working. Hmm.

Update

So, the casing was wrong. My laptop claims its vendor to be ACER while the section in the HAL file was matching on "Acer". I changed it to match case insensitively, as well as adding the entry for C100 on vbe_post.

I'll mention that I didn't discover this by suddenly clueing in, but by running:

$ pm-suspend --quirk-vbe-post --store-quirks-as-fdi

And viewing the output at /etc/hal/fdi/information/99local-pm-utils-quirks.fdi.

Now HAL reads the quirk entry from the fdi. Yay.

Fedora and Masochism

So I installed Fedora 10 on my laptop the other day and: what a mess! My first issue was that X wasn't working. I actually helped resolve that the other day with an X developer in Ubuntu, so I applied the same fix, and voila.

Second, I couldn't log in! I would go to GDM, login, and then it would wait interminably. I eventually tried reinstalling GDM and rebooting. That ended up working, somewhat. However, all I got was a blank panel and a few icons. I have now populated that panel. Did something fail to copy over the items? Did they fail to load? This was caused by one of two issues:

• dbus-1.2.6. What utter fail. Yes, it is a security risk, but the solution is not to update a fundamental package that will break the desktops of all your users who bother to diligently install security fixes. Yikes. It's still not totally resolved. A relevant Fedora/Redhat bug: 475068; freedesktop bug: 18229
• A gstreamer issue. My new user account had ~/.gstreamer-0.10 with permissions that prevented the creation of the file registry.i386.bin, without which gstreamer segfaults. Yikes!

I'll note that the gstreamer issue also took away:

• my sound, and
• my power management! I don't really understand how that worked, but I didn't have suspend or hibernate, or the battery applet while that gstreamer file couldn't be made. Relevant bug: 475125

The errors I received due to the gstreamer (as reported in /var/log/messages and ~/.xsession-errors) include:

• gnome-settings-[8894]: segfault at 4 ip 00fef0f5 sp bffb8020 error 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[f6b000+bc000]
• gnome-power-man[8893]: segfault at 4 ip 06e320f5 sp bfe37190 error 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[6dae000+bc000]
• mixer-applet2[9015]: segfault at 4 ip 06e320f5 sp bfd86bd0 error in 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[6dae000+bc000]

Finally, my stylus does not work. My configuration expects /dev/input/wacom which is apparently wrong on Fedora. I need to find out which device file it becomes associated with, and then all will be well once more...