Linux Problems

There are many known problems with the Linux installation on the tablets. Typically this is because hardware manufacturers to not write drivers for Linux, so we must instead rely on the work of volunteers who reverse-engineer our hardware to make drivers. That having been said, the Linux installations are *mostly* working (the tc1100s seem to work much better than the 4200s), and do offer some advantages over Windows.

Here are some of the problems we know about:

Suspend/Hibernate cause problems or do not work

Suspend and hibernate work fairly well on the tc4200s with some problems (for example, wireless networking not working after hibernate), but neither works very well on the tc1100s.

Wireless networking will stop working after the 4200 comes out of sleep mode. This can be fixed by editing the file /etc/default/acpi-support and changing this line:

MODULES="yenta_socket ipw2200"

to this:

MODULES="yenta_socket tg3 ipw2200"

Tablet sometimes will not boot

The tc4200 tablets have new ACPI hardware which is not yet well supported in Linux. Sometimes a bug will prevent the tablet from booting into Linux, or make it boot very slowly. This seems to be related to the CPU temperature, and so the only solution currently known is to turn the tablet off and allow it about 10 minutes to cool off before starting it again. We hope to have an update to fix this problem soon.

This appears to be fixed in the 2.6.15 kernel.

VPN connection breaks

When using VPN, networking stops working at regular intervals. This appears to be due to the VPN server disconnecting the client after a period of no traffic. This can be fixed immediately by disconnecting/reconnecting the VPN.

One way to prevent this happening is to type watch -n 10 "ping -c1 slate" at a command prompt. As long as this is running (the command window is still open), the machine will ping slate every 10 seconds, which will prevent the VPN being disconnected. We will likely build this solution into our custom VPN software and offer an update for download.

Missing Packages

The following packages were overlooked in the current build:

• aspell
• aspell-en
• ispell
• myspell-en-us
• xpp