Whispers of R’lyeh

So I’ve been struggling with the eth5k drivers (and the madwifi alternative) on the tablet – both connect fine as long as my AP is unencrypted, but as soon as I add either WEP or WPA Personal security it just fails. In a last-ditch attempt to get wireless comms up, I’m installing the Windows XP network drivers into Linux using ndiswrapper.

Step Six: Installing ndiswrapper

apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

I’ve previously extracted the driver into /home/user/wireless

cd /home/user/wireless

ndiswrapper -i PRISMNIC.inf

modprobe ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -m

Followed by a reboot, picking a religion at random, and offering up a prayer.

It didn’t work.  However, I got a warning that /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper needed a .conf extension – so I quickly renamed and rebooted again…

Aaand still not working

To be continued…

Step Five: Installing Xine

A nice short one today

apt-get install xine-ui

And then

xine <avi file>

plays back anything from my mounted media library quite happily. No messing with codecs or anything

I decided at the last moment to avoid NFS, because of the lack of security in its default form, and my lack of understanding of how to configure it in a more complicated way.

Also, CIFS mounts mean I only have to do this once, and my Windows machines can use it too

After adding a SAMBA share on the server, it was pretty easy to mount on the tablet:

Step Four: CIFS Mounts

First off, I needed to

apt-get install smbfs

to add the filesystem support.

Then it was just a matter of adding

//shire/media    /mnt/media    cifs    noauto,username=xxxx,password=xxxx,uid=1000,gid=1000

to the /etc/fstab file

Step Two: Ubuntu Desktop on USB

I’m usually a server person: I like to know my install is free of “desktop toys” before installing a minimal gnome plus whatever I want.  However, this time I needed an install that would boot directly into a desktop environment once it had finished, so I could ditch the USB keyboard and start using the stylus and a onscreen keyboard.

Getting an Ubuntu Desktop ISO onto a bootable USB stick was as easy as grabbing UNetbootin and running it.  I decided to go with a 6GB partition for Ubuntu, resizing the existing XP Tablet Edition to 14GB (just in case I still wanted it later – it would be easy enough to wipe and reformat it to ext3 later if I wanted it for Ubuntu)

Everything installed perfectly, was then just a matter of a few stylus taps to get an onscreen keyboard via System>Preferences>Assistive Technologies

There was a bit of graphics corruption on some text, which I’m hoping will disappear once I install the updates from the internet.

Step Three: Networking

The good news: Ubuntu picked up both the onboard ethernet and wifi natively.

The bad news: Try as I might, I couldn’t get the wifi to connect.  It could see my network, but just rejected every combination of the WEP key I could come up with.

As with the graphics corruption, I’m not going to worry about this until I’ve installed all the latest updates – which I’m now doing via the onboard ethernet.

To-Do:

• Get wifi working
• Fix graphics corruption
• Strip out unwanted crap
• Install word processor, web browser, and email
• Look into handwriting recognition possibilities
• Configure remote VNC connection to server
• Configure NFS to my server’s media archive
• Configure Freevo to play my media archive
• Configure the TV capture card on my server, and set up live streaming to the tablet with some means of remote control to change channels!

The RM RTAB910 Tablet is actually a Tatung TTAB-910e, rebadged and resold by Research Machines in the UK to educational establishments somewhere around 2003.  They’re now turning up all over ebay as they reach the end of their useful school lifetimes, and I was lucky enough to pick one up for £70.

I’d been looking for something tablet-ey for roaming ebook/browser use, but the normal price for a Tablet PC is around £1000, with the only real budget option being the £350 Fizzbook Spin.  I couldn’t afford either, so was saving for the Fizzbook when it struck me that I don’t really need a brand new one, and something second-hand and lower-spec would do just fine.

I say lower-spec, but compared to modern Netbooks a P866 processor and 256MB of RAM running Windows XP and Office 2003 at a half-decent speed really isn’t that bad – and I thought was pretty amazing for the price.  All I really need is something with a decent-sized display thats capable of acting as a thin client into my wireless network so I can stream movies, or read ebooks, or surf the net.  Then once I noticed the amount of these things being sold, I figured others might like a little how-to guide on turning these into productive members of society.

I made sure I picked a seller with a decently-high rating, and who had sold a few tablets recently with positive feedback, to limit the chances of being stuck with something unusable.  Even so, I was expecting to have to maybe replace the HDD for the price it was listed or do some other work, but was pleasantly surprised when it arrived in full working order (and even a battery charge).

Specifications

866Mhz Processor
256MB Memory
20GB HDD
2x USB 1.0 Ports
Built-in Wifi
Onboard Intel Network Adaptor
Onboard Intel Graphics

- This is for the RTAB910-S01 “Student” version that I have.  There was also an RTAB910-T01 “Teacher” tablet which added a fingerprint sensor for security plus a PCMCIA slot, which theoretically would be useful for adding in a PCMCIA-to-USB2.0 card.

Step 1 – Booting

The RTAB910 has no drives, so to install a new OS you’re going to need to either plug in an external USB CD/Floppy drive, or install boot files onto a USB stick.  I used Hiren’s Boot CD, and followed the instructions for putting it on a memory stick.  Then its just a matter of using the “Universal TCP/IP Network” option from there to map to boot into DOS with a mapped network drive – I’d rather do this than be limited to the speed of the USB 1.0 ports, plus I had no idea where my external USB drive caddy was anyway.

I took the opportunity here to clone the hard drive, which had arrived with a nice working install of Windows XP Tablet Edition plus Office 2003.  My plan was to wipe the drive and install Ubuntu Linux onto the tablet.  Normally I’d have chosen Debian but I recently found Ubuntu was better for quick and simple installs without having to mess around downloading essential functionality seperately.

One of the first issues I ran into is that Samba by default doesn’t accept LanMan authentication any more – see http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2008-September/061363.html for details on turning this back on.

That problem solved, the machine ghosted happily over the network, so I can put it back to a near-factory state in the future if I decide to.  Or if this project doesn’t work out.

To be continued…