Maximimized Onboard keyboard problem

So while messing around with the onboard keyboard I double-clicked it's top bar by mistake and ended up with the keyboard totally covering my screen. To further complicate things, in UNR, the maximize/close/minimize buttons are hidden, so there is basically no way to change the size of the onboard window once it is maximized.



After a good hour or so of tinkering I fell upon this discussion:
https://answers.launchpad.net/onboard/+question/127746

So basically all you need to do is use a normal keyboard to launch gconf-editor from a terminal and then go under /apps/Onboard and change the Height and Width settings and relaunch onboard and it should be fine from then on.

One mistake I did make was I had su-ed and was configuring the wrong profile, which prolonged my confirming the solution.

debb1046 mentioned twofing which should allow you to use two fingers to scroll and do some fancy multitouch things with ubuntu (I believe you have to make sure you install the ppa/utouch).


Cheers

WeTab Ubuntu Installation

So I've finally had the time to open up my WeTab again and start fiddling around with it. Actually I had sort of given up on the WeTab a bit, especially after the seeing the Bookman reader on IPad work so beautifully and then comparing that with the readers for WeTab...they don't compare unfortunately. Additionally the performance of the OS leaves a lot to be desired.

In any case, I've made my peace with the WeTab and started caring for it once more. So here without ado, I explain how I went about installing Ubuntu on it.

1- Download the NetBook Remix 10.10 iso (Maverick)
2- Download the Universal Ubuntu USB installer on a windows machine (You could also use Ubuntu to do it, refer to the link I provide below).
3- Download GParted Live (USB version)
4- Make available a USB flash drive, preferably with an LED light
5- USB Mouse and Keyboard (preferably wireless with one receiver to make things easier otherwise you will be doing quite a bit of plugging and inserting)
First off you will need to put GParted on the flash drive (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php#linux-method-b).

Now you should be ready to repartition your WeTab Flash Drive. To do this, connect your USB Flash to the USB port on your WeTab and boot from the USB drive.

To boot from the USB disk is kind of tricky, have a look at the developer page: http://wetab.mobi/en/developers/downloads-and-howtos/
(HowTo – Install WeTab OS with Recovery USB Boot Stick)

Basically you turn on the Wetab and then as soon as you see the blue led in the top left corner light up, press both the power-button and the quicktouch button (top left corner) together for approximately 1 second. It takes a bit of practice to get that just right so don't give up if it doesn't work right away but what should happen then is that your GParted Live should boot up from the USB flash drive.

You can use the quicktouch button on the upper left corner of the WeTab to browse through the Boot menu for Gparted. One touch switches between the option, if you hold down on the quicktouch button, it selects the entry. I chose "other modes of Gparted" and then "Run from RAM or memory", this way you can pull out the USB flash drive once it is done loading up the OS.

Once you're in GParted you will want to started up the GParted application (if it doesn't automatically load up). Select the sda3 partition (the biggest one) and then Resize. My WeTab has 32GB, So I resized mine to allow 8 GB for Ubuntu.

It should take about 15 minutes to resize the partitions.

Once that is done you should create a USB Installer for Ubuntu, just follow the directions on http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook/get-ubuntu/download where it says Create a USB Drive (click show me how).

Again now, just like we had booted up the GParted image off of our USB flash, you should boot up the Ubuntu Installer from the flash drive.

Once it loads up and asks you to Try or Install, choose Install Ubuntu. Follow along on the screens to come. When it asks you where you would like to Install the system, choose "Install along side another OS". At this point you can just let it go on and do it's thing however, the bootloader will be replaced and you will get Ubuntu's GRUB if you reboot. I chose instead the "Manual" option and basically clicked on the unallocated space, created an ext3 partition and marked it as / (root) for Ubuntu to install on it. On the bottom where it asks you where the Bootloader should go, I selected sda4 which is the new partition we created earlier.

Go ahead and Install Ubuntu and then once it is done, restart and go into your original WeTab Os.

You must now modify the extlinux.conf file under /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf in order to load up Ubuntu.

Add the following lines at the bottom of you extlinux.conf

label Ubuntu
menu label ^Ubuntu
KERNEL chain.c32
APPEND hd0 4

Notice the Append tells extlinux that the logical partition sought for booting is on harddrive 0 and partition 4 (/dev/sda4), where we installed Ubuntu along with it's own GRUB loader.

Next we need to modify the GRUB settings for our Ubuntu installation to enable the touchscreen. Restart the machine and go into your Ubuntu install from the bootup menu (use the quicktouch button to select the Ubuntu install).

Once you are inside Ubuntu, open up a terminal session (click the ubuntu button on the top left corner, type "terminal" in the search bar and then double click the icon when it shows up.

Now to enable the touchscreen we must follow Samiux's and W3C's directions (http://samiux.blogspot.com/2010/07/howto-ubuntu-1004-on-gigabyte-touchnote.html and http://digitalorchard.blogspot.com/2010/12/wetabos-to-pure-meego.html but follow along don't do what is on those pages, I'll cut and paste here).

First off you want to change the GRUB loading parameters as Samiux describes, but you need to follow W3C's advice regarding the correct hexadecimal value to add in. So first do an lsusb:

$>lsusb
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 04d9:a015 Holtek Semiconductor, Inc.
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0eef:72a1 D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 04f2:b213 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 12d1:1404 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

note the ID value and place the same values as follows in your GRUB configuration file, Grub 2.o uses a cfg file so go to your /etc/default/grub and modify it to look like the following.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i8042.noloop=1 usbhid.quirks=0xeef:0x72a1:0x40"

Finally, you should copy the Xorg calibration files from the original WeTab Os to your Ubuntu install (actually I am not sure if this step is needed):

$>sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/
$> sudo mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
$>sudo cp /mnt/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

Now I will make note also that I had updated my utouch drivers as follows but I believe the above will work regardless, if you have any feedback please post it below. I suggest you try the above first and if it doesn't work, then do the below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:utouch-team/utouch
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:utouch-team/unstable

sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get update

Finally, you should start the virtual keyboard onboard:

$>onboard

You will notice the "onboard" icon on the left toolbar. Right-click the icon and select "Keep in launcher", also open preferences and check "show keyboard when unlocking".

Cheers!


UPDATE 26 FEB 2011:
---------------------------------------
The above installation enables only single touch, to enable multitouch on Ubuntu on WeTab, please see: http://wetabz.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-about-touchsceen-and-multitouch.html

WeTab recovery, BIOS and stuff

Ok so in my previous post I complained loudly about there being no obvious specialness to the BIOS on the WeTab and that all the WeTab-specific shtuff (including the recovery program) existed on the SDD only.

I rescind that statement, I was...sadly...but thankfully....WRONG!

I was having trouble using the Recovery USB-Stick method because the sticks weren't being picked up by the BIOS process. I'm not sure why, I've had that problem consistenly with my WeTab...when I added the Plop boot  manager and tried to boot from a USB stick, that same USB would in some cases load up fine and in others give me a kernel panic on boot-up. I'm not sure why that happens, I'm thinking maybe the USB ports are a little off, maybe the metal contacts on the USB-stick are a little worn out, I'm not sure exactly why. Anyhow switching to a different USB-stick with the WeTabRecovery image on it worked fine for me and I was able to recover to the updated image offered on the developers website.

That's actually good news because it means no matter how bad I mess around with the SDD contents, I could always recover without having to break the hardware warranty by opening up the device and taking out the disk (I'm not sure how easy that would have been either).

Regarding the update to the Keyboard, I'm actually liking it except for the fact that the CTRL and SHIFT keys aren't there. The ESC now exists as well as most of the symbols you might need for some scripting/programming, though using the virtual keyboard extendedly is just a pain.

I'm still thinking that ergonomically using tablets is not much fun. Something still feels like it's lacking, looking down at the thing for extended periods of time gives you a crick in the neck. Also if your not sitting up straight the weight of the device gets uncomfortable. And then if your lying down in bed you have to keep your elbows bent to be able to interact with the device. Yes yes, I am a lazy SOB.

So here's an idea of how this can all be mitigated. First we have to eliminate the hand interaction altogether, I always thought the idea of a "touch" device was nice because, well, in some ways it's a much more "personal" experience ( wonder if Jim Morisson was that far ahead with all that LSD, I swear, before I bought that Wetab I could almost hear some of those devices call out to me "come on come on now touch me babe" ). Anyhow so here's the first link:



A couple of years from now and that headset will probably be as comfortable as earphones I suppose.

Now once that is solved we need to do something about the weight of the device. When we were in disneyland about some 15 years ago, I was just dazzled by one the rooms that had had some quite nifty holograms with ghosts flying around in a room that you looked into from the side. Actually if you've seem the Second Iron Man movie they've already thought of that idea, personal computer that threw up a hologramic screen that floated around the room. I guess you could call that invention a Holo-PC.

Well enough day-dreaming for one day.

Hmmm...I wonder what the EFI BIOS looks like and how to mess around with that...I never learn...

Latest update

So the latest update completely broke my WeTab, probably because of all the mods I had or possibly because it was doing something integral with system *without notifying me and I must have shut it down while it was chugging away. What happened after that was the Pinboard was just flashing like crazy when it loaded up again. A soft reset didn't help.

I wasn't really upto diagnosing so I followed the Developer notes on recovering: http://wetab.mobi/en/developers/. I should add here that if you have trouble with this it may be the USB stick's fault. I had to rummage through a pile of sticks until I could get one that was ok (come to think of it I had to wipe out one of my bigger externals and used that). The directions are pretty clear, you just have to download the recover image, dd that onto your USB (so you should probably keep copies of whatever you had on that stick somewhere else), and then follow the directions (powerbutton + soft touch on startup). It shouldn't take very long to recover the system.

After that I found a nice LiveCD for GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) to repartition the SDD so that I could install Meego (http://digitalorchard.blogspot.com/2010/12/wetabos-to-pure-meego.html).
Please note that if you go ahead with the Meego install it will remove the original bootloader that was on the system and you're then at the mercy of the one installed by Meego (it's extlinux, but it doesn't recognize the soft-touch and it doesn't have the recovery mechanism used by the original WeTab. SO BE SURE TO BACKUP ALL OF /dev/sda before you fool around.

Well. I installed Meego and I learned all of the above the hardway. The thing that scared me the most was when I messed up my booting entry for the WeTab OS while it was the default startup entry, the screen would just sit there and reload and reload, it was as if the booter was reloading itself over and over. Well, I took a bathroom break and came back to try again, the softtouch wasn't being registered at all, so I threw out my last hope...the keyboard, and....it worked! I was able to login to Meego again and fix up my extlinux.conf. Of course before that I was trying like a madman to recover using the directions from the WeTab recovery steps mentioned earlier. I'm sorry but I don't see what they mean by a BIOS if that system really just exists on the frigin disk, it's just a loader. Before I jumped head in I thought that there was some sort of save-your-ass ROM routine that responded to the power+soft button trick for recovery and that the recovery program was some how kept in some safe non-writeable storage. Nope, that is not the case. The only way out of this had I really mucked things up would have been to rip out the harddrive and recover the original image onto it using and external harddrive controller.

Anyhow, I'm not too happy hanging in the wind with the Meego loader. I've decided to burn back my original /dev/sda I had made way back when I wrote the post on backing up (http://wetabz.blogspot.com/2010/10/wetab-backup.html). The way I'm doing this...and I hope it doesn't fail me miserably is that I booted up with the GParted livecd I mentioned earlier and ran the system from RAM (which is nice because then you have a free USB port for the harddrive with the backup image and the other port for the Keyboard without which you can't tell it to do the Restore...dd if=/backup.img of=/dev/sda...

I will write back (well hopefully Iwill), in the event that this fails I will probably be crying like a little girl somewhere for a couple of weeks (well not really, I'll probably be voiding my warranty and playing with my WeTab's internals, I guess I could then try the 2GB trick...ah, the possibilities).

Well apart from all the above, I've forgotten to mention that the new update is actually pretty good. It replaces the old crappy virtual keyboard with a much more functional one, though I still like the look and feel of the matchbox one. And also, finally, you can turn off Automatic Updates and regain your sanity in that respect.

Apart from this I'm still trying to sort out whether I like this gizmo, it's far too bulky to sit comfortably with and it heats up like a mother-father. Well, until later folks, adios!