Goodbye Fedora?
It’s been a good trip, but I’ve almost had enough. At least on my portables.
I recently got a shiny new X61 tablet laptop with the kick-butt 1400×1050 screen, all in a 14″ frame. Oh, and the 4GB of RAM, 160GB SATA at 7200 RPM, core 2 duo, and wifi/bluetooth/fingerprint and it’s a tablet, so there’s a stylus and rotating screen.
I also have ‘ol sturdy, the X41 (non-tablet) that I’ve had now for about three and a half years. I upgraded it to Fedora 8 a few days ago and it’s mostly worked, but there’s a few dingleberries in the upgrade that I haven’t bothered to figure out what the problem is. For example, new applications start with the title bar underneath the top panel, so I have to move or hide the panel before I can move the new window. Also, my Fn-F5 key (which should power off the Bluetooth radio) suddenly stopped working. Some ACPI think that decided to stop working. Wireless with the atheros chipset is always finicky when coming back from resume, and bluetooth integration is still pretty sub-par, especially with my Treo 700p. It doesn’t help that the Treo itself is pretty finicky when it comes to bluetooth connections.
But on the new X61t, things just went from blah to bad. On the good side, the Intel 3945 ABG wireless card worked out of the box. The fingerprint reader worked after installing thinkfinger (way easy to do). But everything else was just not right. The wacom tablet device (the stylus and screen) weren’t recognized and I had to fight with it. To make matters worse, the serial device that wacom uses changes depending on if you’re in the dock or not. In the dock, it’s /dev/ttyS1. When out of the dock, it’s /dev/ttyS0. Annoying, especially if you have all that hard coded into various locations. In addition, the screen rotation and ACPI events aren’t set up for thinkpads. This makes configuring different events a lot harder, since you have to do them by hand. But fiddling with the wacom was the last straw for me.
I use debian at home for my server and use it in many aspects of work, so using apt and .deb aren’t foreign concepts to me. In fact, it has a few advantages over yum, which always wants to hit the network even for local search operations. Very annoying.
Many of the sites that describe using the X61 tablet (or the similar X41 tablet) are based on working with Ubuntu, so it was time for me to give it a try. So far, I’m liking what I see. The wacom was found at install time (though I had to enable it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf by uncommenting three lines), my Treo was able to dial in the first try, and wireless was a snap. Screen rotation is still a little off, but I have it manually working and will probably have ACPI events for it working soon so it’ll autorotate. Best of all, suspend and resume are working good as well, as I’ve done it a few times and it always comes back (yay!).
My few remaining problems are figuring out why the wacom pen device hangs every now and then. I discovered I can clear it by going to a text console and back to X, but that won’t really help when I’m in tablet mode, and the pen seems to hang after just a few minutes use. There may be an updated driver floating around that will fix this….
Fedora will remain on my desktop, at least for a little while. They’re still the 800lb gorilla, and lots of people still provide .rpm versions of their software. Over time, I expect that to change and see more .deb and repositories picking up.