Ubuntu on a Lenovo X61 Tablet & maintain digitizer & screen rotation ?

Does anyone know whether Ubuntu is supported on the Lenovo X61 Tablet? I want the pen & tablet digitizer, and screen rotation functionality via the hard button, to continue to operate. I worry about the driver support necessary to do so. I have the 1440x1050 rez screen option, sans capacitive finger touch.

I made the mistake of leaving Lenovo's bloatware in place, then allowing Lenovo's bloatware to update all of it to the latest versions. I'm left with a nearly unusable machine that takes 10 minutes to boot and login, and operates @ a snail's pace once complete. On top of that the video driver now keeps failing leaving me with something like 640x480 4-bit color until I reboot. I'm going to have to scrub the HD and start over. Question is, with what.

Thanx much,
-steve

 

Technically I think that you can run Ubuntu on the x61 tablet, but tablet computer support on Linux is very poor at the moment (and for the forseeable future).

If the Lenovo applications really left your computer in that bad of state then you have something going on wrong with your system other than just Lenovo. My x61 has all of the applications and still runs great to this day. If you are having continued issues, I would suggest grabbing an upgrade to windows 7 if you can.

 

the support doesn't look to be great, but check the Thinkwiki and the Ubuntu forums.

 

Thanx much folks.

I never knew about Thinkwiki. That pretty much says it all.

 

Not sure about the x61, but the pen is supported out of the box on Ubuntu 9.10 (and presumably 9.04 and 10.04) on my x200 Tablet. Automatic screen rotation is another matter though.

 

I've had mixed experiences with Ubuntu on my X61t. I originally installed Jaunty (9.04) which worked really well out of the box - including pen and screen rotation via the button. I can't remember whether multitouch was supported (I don't use it much) and the auto-rotate didn't work, but otherwise it was perfectly usable as a tablet.

Then I let it update to Karmic (9.10) which managed somehow to disable the pen. I've read in various places that it was just a default that some developer decided to change, but I never got to the bottom of it and never found the setting that needed to change. So I reluctantly went back to XP, having abandoned Vista Business early on due to unreliability and slowness.

I've since installed Debian, in various versions, which has worked as well as Jaunty did, but it took a fair bit of manual tweaking to get everything working. I still run a Debian partition for development work (sadly, I have to use MSOffice for work, so can't get rid of Windows entirely).

Very recently, I installed 64-bit Windows 7, which is a vast improvement on Vista Business. It feels faster and is easier to use in tablet form. I haven't got the autorotate working, though (it works in XP, which is my fall-back OS). I'm not normally a Microsoft advocate, but so far MS seem to have finally "got things right" in Win 7.

Haven't tried the newest stable Ubuntu (10.04) yet, it's on my list of things to try...

BTW, I've never had problems with the 'bloatware', except for the Toolbox, which is just generally slow with its visual effects. The other apps seem to be pretty slick overall.