Linux Mint 12 on HP Slate 500
Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2011 4:39 am
Hi yesterday I spent a couple of hours installing mint 12 on an hp slate 500, mostly out of fun, not because I think the platform is any good, and just wanted to share some experiences.
- First, the live usb would not boot up Xorg, due to graphics card driver (Intel GMA 500 identified as Poulsbo) not correctly booting up (see this topic: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=86974) but this can be solve by adding vga=0x315 to correctly set up the vga card into 800x600 kernel-wise. This is just for the card to be correctly configured, gnome correctly sets and identifies 1024x600 while running.
- Live USB looked pretty good, bars and everything there. No on-screen keyboard, and audio driver is a bit messed up. Bluetooth, wireless were fine and battery/power too. "I'll take the risk and install it" I thought then.
- First of the problems that appeared when booting up was that the panels were not exactly as the live USB version. Concretely, they lacked the indications (battery meter, wireless etc), active applications, desktop switcher etc. The solution: press Windows_key+Alt+RightMouseClick on the bar and hopla! the context menu appears. For the meters and indications to appear, click on "Add to panel" and add a "notification area" that will bring your battery, wireless, volume, bluetooth etc back to live. I can tell you this took about an hour of going mad through. Then I could also put the panel bars to the sides and made them 40 pixels wide which is better for a tablet pc with a touchscreen.
Oh and I had a bad experience with the panels autohide so I don't recommend it
- Chrome. I'm a fan of firefox but hate the extra silly bars all over the page reducing my view, while Chrome, evil as it is, has more browsing real state, so I went to the download page, chose the .32bit .deb file, downloaded it and run from a console
(perhaps, alternatively, navigate to Applications->System Tools->GDebi Package Installer, select the downloaded file and click on Install. I'm a command line geek.
When using a tablet I think it's better dragging for browsing, meaning something like the smartphones, clicking with the finger and dragging it moves the browsed web page as opposed to selecting text. For this, Firefox has an extension called drag'n'drop (go to Tools->add-Ons and search+install it in Firefox). Chrome has something similar, open it, navigate to http://www.chromeextensions.org/appeara ... rometouch/ and then click on "add to chrome", this should do.
- Pic of the result
- Todo's: add OnScreen Keyboard (tried two but neither worked), hopefully make this keyboard appear on text fields click, and sort out problem with playback of music files. But still the tablet is usable
- First, the live usb would not boot up Xorg, due to graphics card driver (Intel GMA 500 identified as Poulsbo) not correctly booting up (see this topic: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=86974) but this can be solve by adding vga=0x315 to correctly set up the vga card into 800x600 kernel-wise. This is just for the card to be correctly configured, gnome correctly sets and identifies 1024x600 while running.
- Live USB looked pretty good, bars and everything there. No on-screen keyboard, and audio driver is a bit messed up. Bluetooth, wireless were fine and battery/power too. "I'll take the risk and install it" I thought then.
- First of the problems that appeared when booting up was that the panels were not exactly as the live USB version. Concretely, they lacked the indications (battery meter, wireless etc), active applications, desktop switcher etc. The solution: press Windows_key+Alt+RightMouseClick on the bar and hopla! the context menu appears. For the meters and indications to appear, click on "Add to panel" and add a "notification area" that will bring your battery, wireless, volume, bluetooth etc back to live. I can tell you this took about an hour of going mad through. Then I could also put the panel bars to the sides and made them 40 pixels wide which is better for a tablet pc with a touchscreen.
Oh and I had a bad experience with the panels autohide so I don't recommend it
- Chrome. I'm a fan of firefox but hate the extra silly bars all over the page reducing my view, while Chrome, evil as it is, has more browsing real state, so I went to the download page, chose the .32bit .deb file, downloaded it and run from a console
Code: Select all
sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb
When using a tablet I think it's better dragging for browsing, meaning something like the smartphones, clicking with the finger and dragging it moves the browsed web page as opposed to selecting text. For this, Firefox has an extension called drag'n'drop (go to Tools->add-Ons and search+install it in Firefox). Chrome has something similar, open it, navigate to http://www.chromeextensions.org/appeara ... rometouch/ and then click on "add to chrome", this should do.
- Pic of the result
- Todo's: add OnScreen Keyboard (tried two but neither worked), hopefully make this keyboard appear on text fields click, and sort out problem with playback of music files. But still the tablet is usable