Category: PC Tweakage

As mentioned there, Ubuntu prohibits having two mice with different handedness. Xubuntu enumerates the various mice and allows you to set their handedness separately.

This file swaps the upper two buttons.

The scroll ring operates intermittently. I no longer believe it’s a hardware problem, as I have two Kensington trackballs and both behave the same way. I’m guessing the evdev driver has trouble with button pushes from two devices, but that’s just a guess. Sometimes it works perfectly for hours on end, other times it jams up first thing in the morning. Restarting X helps, which indicates the hole isn’t in the trackball’s end of the boat.

Here’s my /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-expertmouse.fdi file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
 <match key="input.product" string="Kensington      Kensington Expert Mouse">
 <append key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">3 8 1 4 5 6 7 2</merge>
 </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

[Update: made the code block cut-and-paste-able. Sorry ’bout that…]

For some background on a single-monitor box, read that first. This file is for my dual-monitor setup, which introduces horrible problems: basically, this setup doesn’t really work.

The MMonitor and ScreenNo values restrict the tablet to the left-hand X screen. Without those settings, things get really weird.

But, with the X screen nailed down, the fundamental problem is that the tablet stylus cursor starts out restricted to just the upper-left part of the left-hand (landscape) monitor. The fraction of the screen seems somehow related to the aggregate total of the two monitors, but not in any numeric sense I can figure out.

The fix for that is tweaking the BottomX and BottomY values so that the cursor can cover the entire screen. I used the wacomcpl utility to cut-and-try various numbers until I got something close. They are quite different than the tablet’s default values: 16700 and 12064.

The values suggest that the driver expects the tablet to cover the entire range of coordinates for both monitors, but whether that’s with the right monitor rotated or not isn’t obvious. The numbers do not work out either way. Maybe it’s taking the outermost bounding box?

It is not clear why this hocus-pocus works at all, as I thought those values were supposed to restrict the stylus cursor to specific locations of the tablet’s surface. Evidently they’re scaling factors.

Note that this fdi file adds the names required by wacomcpl, without which nothing works.

The GIMP is markedly unhappy with this arrangement. Mostly, the stylus works and provides pressure information, but none of the trackballs or the tablet can select fields within some (but not all) of the dialog boxes (like, for example, File->Save…). Only the keyboard Tab key can move between fields in that situation.

The wacdump utility segfaults. This seems to be a known problem with Ubuntu 9.10, for reasons that aren’t clear.

Sometimes, but not always, the stylus cursor has an offset: the visible cursor on the screen is a few inches up-and-right of the actual tool location that’s affecting the drawing. When this happens, tweaking the BottomX and BottomY values with wacomcpl sometimes restores proper operation; the ensuing values have no relation with anything I can understand.

Much to my surprise, button remapping works perfectly: the front switch on the stylus is Button 3, the rear is Button 2. That means context menus pop up on the more easily reached switch. At least I think so.

Basically, something that worked absolutely dependably and without much manual intervention in 8.10 has become completely, totally, and utterly dysfunctional in 9.10. I do not count this as progress.

With all that in mind, here’s the /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-linuxwacom.fdi file…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
 <match key="info.product" string="Wacom Graphire3 6x8">
 <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">wacom</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Button2" type="string">3</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Button3" type="string">2</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.MMonitor" type="string">off</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ScreenNo" type="string">0</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomX" type="string">8146</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomY" type="string">11893</merge>
 <append key="info.callouts.add" type="strlist">hal-setup-wacom</append>
 <append key="wacom.types" type="strlist">eraser</append>
 <append key="wacom.types" type="strlist">cursor</append>
 </match>
 </device>
 <!-- Wacom names "parser" -->
 <device>
 <match key="info.udi" contains_not="subdev_0">
 <match key="info.udi" contains_not="subdev_1">
 <match key="info.udi" contains_not="subdev_2">
 <match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="stylus">
 <merge key="info.product" type="string">stylus</merge>
 </match>
 <match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="eraser">
 <merge key="info.product" type="string">eraser</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.MMonitor" type="string">off</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ScreenNo" type="string">0</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomX" type="string">8146</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomY" type="string">11893</merge>
 </match>
 <match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="cursor">
 <merge key="info.product" type="string">cursor</merge>
 </match>
 </match>
 </match>
 </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

After considerable thrashing, this hand-tweaked version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf seems to do what’s needed for Xubuntu 9.10. It includes only display setup stuff; all the input device configuration is now tucked away in HAL FDI files.

I used the nvidia-settings control panel to create a basic xorg.conf file that used separate X sessions, saved it in my home directory, then tweaked it in small increments until everything worked. Or, more precisely, until things stopped failing…

Some observations:

• Obviously, this uses the proprietary nVidia driver
• The option Rotate CCW line must be commented out (or omitted) to avoid killing xrandr, because many utilities expect xrandr
• Use the Xubuntu display setup applet to apply the xrandr rotation; just specify Screen 2 as rotated left
• X locks up occasionally when Wacom tablet cursor falls into the seam between the displays. Make sure you can ssh into the box to restart X: an X crash kills the keyboard, too!
• Metamodes must specify the exact monitor resolution
• The nVidia logo doesn’t appear on either monitor during boot, even with NoLogo turned off. I like the logo, because it gives an early heads-up when something goes wrong.

The xorg.conf file:

Section "ServerLayout"
 Identifier     "RotatedPortrait"
 Screen      0  "Landscape" 0 0
 Screen      1  "Portrait" RightOf "Landscape"
EndSection

Section "Module"
 Load           "dbe"
 Load           "extmod"
#   Load           "type1"
#   Load           "freetype"
 Load           "glx"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
 Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
 Identifier     "Dell2001FP"
 VendorName     "Dell"
 ModelName      "DELL 2001FP"
 HorizSync       31.0 - 80.0
 VertRefresh     56.0 - 76.0
 Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
 Identifier     "Dell2005FP"
 VendorName     "Dell"
 ModelName      "DELL 2005FPW"
 HorizSync       30.0 - 83.0
 VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
 Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier     "GF9400_0"
 Driver         "nvidia"
 VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
 BoardName      "GeForce 9400 GT"
 BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
 Screen          0
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier     "GF9400_1"
 Driver         "nvidia"
 VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
 BoardName      "GeForce 9400 GT"
 BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
 Screen          1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier     "Landscape"
 Device         "GF9400_0"
 Monitor        "Dell2001FP"
 DefaultDepth    24
 Option         "TwinView" "0"
 Option         "metamodes" "DFP-0: 1600x1200 +0+0"
 Option         "NoLogo" "Off"
 SubSection     "Display"
 Depth       24
 EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier     "Portrait"
 Device         "GF9400_1"
 Monitor        "Dell2005FP"
 DefaultDepth    24
 Option         "TwinView" "0"
 Option         "metamodes" "DFP-1: 1680x1050 +0+0"
 Option         "NoLogo" "Off"
 Option         "RandRRotation" "On"
#    Option         "Rotate" "CCW"
 SubSection     "Display"
 Depth       24
 EndSubSection
EndSection

Ubuntu 9.10 uses ext4 filesystems by default and it’s usually a Good Thing to not mess with defaults early in the installation.

That precept worked up to the point where I wanted to make a full-partition backup before doing something potentially catastrophic… at which point I discovered that the current version of System Rescue CD has a version of partimage that doesn’t know about ext4 filesystems. While FSArchiver looks promising, all I really wanted was a quick-and-simple backup and (possibly) restoration.

So. Once again, dd to the rescue.

This being a fresh installation, there’s not much other data to contend with. In fact, the installation uses under 3 GB, but it’s in a 32 GB partition. Wouldn’t It Would Be Nice If we could back up just the 10% of useful data and skip the rest?

Reboot to System Rescue CD (hereinafter, SRC) and, while that’s happening, plug in a spare hard drive using a USB-to-SATA converter. That will be the “backup drive”.

Mount the backup drive (which appeared as /dev/sdf1 and will be different for you) at /mnt/backup, which is conveniently provided by SRC:

mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/backup

Mount the partition to be backed up (which is /dev/sda8 and will be different for you) at /mnt/custom, another existing mount point.

mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/custom

Zero out all the unused space by creating one honkin’ big file, then erase it leaving all those highly compressible zeros behind:

dd bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/custom/zero.bin
sync
rm /mnt/custom/zero.bin

Unmount the partition, make the backup, and save the MBR while you’re at it:

umount /mnt/custom
dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda1 | gzip -c -3 > /mnt/backup/boxname-sda8-ext4-32GB.bin.gz
dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/backup/boxname-mbr.bin

The bs=1M option sets a decent blocksize for the read operations, which gets dd trundling along at a pretty good clip by reducing the per-read overhead.

The -c option tells gzip to pipe the output to stdout and not mess with the input file. The -3 says to not waste a lot of time trying to compress the data; much of the partition consists of raw binary executables, so there’s no point. The whole process will be limited by disk I/O speed, most likely.

As it happened, the partition squeezed down into about 1.8 GB worth of gzipped backup file.

Unmount the backup drive, reboot, and do risky things…

As it turned out, I actually had to restore the partition.

Once again, boot into SRC with the backup drive plugged in, mount the backup drive. Restoration is straightforward:

gunzip -c /mnt/backup/boxname-sda8-ext4-32GB.bin.gz | dd bs=1M of=/dev/sda8

Warning: if you bungle the target of that dd, you are so screwed.

You’re both saving and restoring from a specific partition (/dev/sda8, in my case) within the drive, not the whole drive (which would be /dev/sda). Pay attention to what’s on the screen, check twice, and have a full-drive backup lurking in your fireproof safe…

I’m in the process of figuring out which Ubuntu 9.10 desktop will work with my collection of hardware. That I got all this working successfully with Xubuntu 8.10 is most likely a testament to raw determination rather than good sense, but that’s water over the dam.

The hardware:

• Kensington Expert Mouse trackball (must use left-hand buttons)
• Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman (must use right-hand buttons)
• Wacom Graphire3 6×8 tablet (must swap side buttons)
• Dell 2001FP 1600×1200 landscape display (left side)
• Dell 2005FP 1680×1050 portrait display (right side)
• nVidia GeForce 9400 GT dual-DVI card (using nVidia driver)
• Dell Dimension 9150 deskside PC
• Intel HDA Stac92 on-board sound (system sounds)
• Ensoniq AudioPCI plug-in sound (unused right now)
• Logitech USB audio headset (phone calls)

General requirements:

• Monitors must use separate X sessions, not Xinerama or TwinView
• 2005FP must be rotated 1/4 turn CCW into portrait mode
• *buntu preferred, due to large user base

After some trial installations and moderate fiddling, some of which served as blog fodder:

• Kubuntu doesn’t work, as KDE 4.x can’t handle separate X sessions
• Xubuntu is OK, but tends to not have nearly the support of Ubuntu
• Ubuntu comes heartbreakingly close to working

Problems:

• Rotating that monitor is a real problem
• I don’t need RandR, but static rotation in xorg.conf causes other problems
• The tablet wants to cover both screens, but that’s fixable
• Trackball handedness requires careful FDI tweakage
• Previous xorg.conf setup is not useful in the new world of FDI files
• Most configuration documentation isn’t useful in that new world, either

Installations on other household PCs  have gone reasonably well. Installation on my desktop box is in a spare partition, so I can return to What Worked without too much trouble.

With all that in hand, here we go …