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Since last I wrote about the X60 Tablet and how to get it to work with Gentoo Linux a lot of things have happened. Some new versions of Xorg has come out. v86d for the framebuffering and uvesafb has been fixed so it is easier to install and get to work. I have switched to Arch Linux and so on.

I have discovered, with the new Xorg 1.6 and the newest Intel drivers for the graphics card the 3D performance have been upped slightly. But compared to the old i810 drivers, it is still not as good. Though a lot of new features as KVM and such have been implemented.

From my experience the Intel drivers are still a bit buggy. When I have them enabled the newest version does not allow me to rotate my screen as I could do easily before, now it just turns my screen off and I cannot go back and have to restart the computer. Pretty annoying.

The Digitizer works fine with the newest Xorg. You just have to use the development package instead of the stable, since Xorg went over to HAL and moving away from the static xorg.conf, though you still have to load the wacom module in your xorg.conf, and you can still use the Device sections as always. This can probably be done with a fdi file too, I have not investigated that yet though.

I am going to test out Xorg 1.6.1 soon, since it just came out and see if it helps out with the rotation issue.

EDIT:

It seems that everything works fine in Xorg 1.6.1, rotation of the screen, linuxwacom and so on, AWESOME!

I just got back light keys to work on my Thinkpad X60t. This is actually pretty easy. If I just had read the documentation for thinkpad_acpi before I would have known.

Anyways lets get to it.

First we need to modprobe thinkpad_acpi with some arguments, otherwise the back light Fn-key combo will not show up as acpi events, and then we will not be able to control the back light.

modprobe thinkpad_acpi brightness_enable=1 hotkey=enable,0xffffff

You probably want to do that on every boot, in gentoo you do that by adding the following to /etc/conf.d/modules:

modules_2_6="${modules_2_6} thinkpad_acpi"
module_thinkpad_acpi_args_2_6="brightness_enable=1 hotkey=enable,0xffffff"

When that is done we can start grabbing some events with acpi_listen, mine looks like this:

tomasz@arcadia ~ $ acpi_listen
ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001011
ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001010

First one is for down second for up.

Now we know this we can make some files for acpid to react on when we push the Fn-key combo for either back light up or down.

/etc/acpi/events/backlight-up:

# called when brightness up key combo is pressed
event=ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001010
action=/etc/acpi/actions/backlight-up

/etc/acpi/events/backlight-down:

# called when brightness down key combo is pressed
event=ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001011
action=/etc/acpi/actions/backlight-down

Now we need some actions. I made a couple of simple bash scripts that looks at the current state of the back light level and subtracts or adds 1 to the level. You can control the level either in /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness or in /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness the latter is as far as I know deprecated, so I am not going to use that.

So here are the scripts:

/etc/acpi/actions/backlight-down:

#! /bin/bash
# A little simple script to control backlight on a Thinkpad X60 Tablet

# Check current state
typeset -i state=`cat /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness`
# Subtract one from the current state and echo it to the file
down=$((state-=1))
echo "$down" > /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness

/etc/acpi/actions/backlight-up:

#! /bin/bash
# A little script to control backlight on a Thinkpad X60 Tablet

# Check current state
typeset -i state=`cat /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness`
# Add one to the current state and echo it to the file
state+=1
echo "$state" > /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness

Reload acpid and see if it works.

/etc/init.d/acpid restart

This should be it!