Running Fedora Linux with the TC1000

by David K. Levine
Go here for instructions on Fedora. I may provide instructions for installation some day. For the moment your best bet is to take a look at Rolig's instructions. Meanwhile, here is a bootable dd image of a 128 MB vfat USB Pen that can be used to start the severn (beta) installation program. To boot from a pen, use the bios to choose the boot device. Under hard disk you will find the pen - move it above the regular hard disk. This image also contains the ntfsresize utility needed to repartition the ntfs disk. It is in the bin directory of the initrd, so can be accessed from rescue mode simply by typing ntfsresize.

Some useful information on upgrading remotely or locally using grub rather than a pen or cd.

The good: The screen works in landscape and portrait mode, and in landscape mode can be cloned to an external display, all with the pen working. Wifi works fine, including WEP. There is a good touch keyboard that can be made available at logon. ACPI works. Vmware and crossover office work. Read/write access is available to the ntfs partition.

The bad: Handwriting recognition and multiple screen support. Each video/pen driver combination has some limitations. ACPI fails to restore the side buttons when the machine wakes up and does not turn off the backlight.

The ugly: Windows XP neatly put a file at the 40 GB boundary and refused to move it, making it possible to allocate only 20 GB to linux. If you have the foresight, partition your disk as soon as you get the system.

A working wifi strength indicator for the gnome panel: download wifistr.server and wifistr.py. Make sure you have the gnome-python2-applet-2.0.0-2 rpm installed from the third Yarrow disk. Put wifistr.server in /usr/lib/bonobo/servers and wifistr.py in /usr/bin, making sure to make it executable by the user. Restart gnome, and it will appear under utilities. It prints the second signal strength measure from /proc/net/wireless, which is the one that has useful information. Signal strength of about 168 appears to mean no signal.

How to get gok work: gok is an alternative to xkbd that handles window focus better; it is installable from the rpm. Make sure to enable sticky keys from the accessibility control panel. Unfortunately gok doesn't work correctly because it recognizes the touchscreen but doesn't handle it correctly - here is the workaround:

#!/bin/bash
 
kill `ps -A | grep gconfd-2`
cp -f ~/apps/gokconf.xml /home/dlevine/.gconf/apps/gok/%gconf.xml
/usr/bin/gok

This kill gconfd-2 erasing the touchscreen support for gok and then installs a fake %gconf.xml file that deletes the touchscreen and forces an error keeping the buggy touchscreen from loading. You will need to put the following gokconf.xml file into your ~/apps directory

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
<entry name="access_method" mtime="1071967193" muser="dlevine" type="string"><stringvalue>directselection</stringvalue></entry>
<entry name="word_complete" mtime="1061150312" muser="dlevine" type="bool" value="false"/>
</gconf>

Wishlist:
 Notes about RedHat 9: Wifi apparently does not work with the 2.4.20 kernel; the atmeldriver compiles and loads but can't find any access points. The Severn kernel if used with RedHat 9 kills X. There is a problem with the /rc/init.d/pcmcia script - if you remove the .o from the kernel modules at around line 105 it starts working. Severn has the same script, but it seems to work OK. There is no acpi support in RH9.

Basic resources on the TC1000 under linux: