Hardy Heron on the Q1 Ultra - First notes.

My first attempt to install failed and the USB key said "No bootable partition on device." Apparently the boot loader didn't install properly on the USB key. After deciding to install it on a partition on the hard drive, I rapidly discovered what happened: I tried to boot into Windows to shrink the NTFS partition in order to to make a 10 GB Ubuntu partition on the hard drive. Upon the next boot from the hard drive, I got the following message:

GRUB Loading stage1.5
GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 21

Apparently, the Ubuntu installation - even when installed to the USB drive - attempted to drop the boot loader on the main hard drive. This fouled up Vista booting as well. Time for repair work.

I booted from the Ubuntu disc again, this time going through the installer and selecting "manual" for disk partitioning. I edited my /dev/sda1 ntfs partition to be 50000 MB instead of the default 60008 MB. It said it "may take a long time" to resize. It took 10 minutes. I created a 9000 GB partition for root and used the rest for swap. I know I have more RAM than swap so cannot hibernate my computer, but I am ok with that.

When creating a password for the user account, remember how much of a pain it is to use symbols or numbers on the Q1 Ultra. I made mine in all letters. After that, the installation was smooth.

Upon first boot, the GRUB boot loader came up fine. I decided to first test if I had lost Vista in the installation. Vista's boot loader triggered just fine but then went right into chkdsk. No errors reported in chkdsk and, upon completion and reboot, Vista worked as well as Vista does.


Time to explore Ubuntu!
What works out of the box:

• Thumb keyboard
• Mouse pointer
• Joystick mode on the mouse pointer
• Wired networking
• WiFi networking
• Bluetooth
• Volume buttons
• User buttons on the right (works as a D pad)
• Visual enhancements
• SD card reader
• Power suspend and resume

What doesn't work:

• Cameras and camera button
• Touch

What works but is SLOW:

• Flash and Flash Video

Now it was time to "borrow" some drivers and information from my working Ubuntu Mobile flash boot device. The filesystems are stored in .img files on the flash drive, so I had to run the following:

(first check to make sure the flash drive is mounted as /media/disk as it would by default.)

mkdir /media/flashdisk
mount /media/disk/rootfs.img /media/flashdisk -o loop

That gave me the root filesystem mounted to /media/flashdisk. I wanted to see what Ubuntu Mobile was using for a touchscreen controller, so I poked around in /media/flashdisk/etc/X11/xorg.conf
I wondered how lazy I could possibly be and still make this work. Here's what I did:

• cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/original.xorg.conf
• cp /media/flashdrive/etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf

As luck would have it, /etc/init.d/xserver-xorg-input-wacom was already in the default Ubuntu installation so I hoped that would work out of the box. Time to reboot!
No such luck. Ubuntu restarted into "low graphics mode." I copied the file back and rebooted again, then removed the Synaptics lines from xorg.conf and added the wacom lines in.
While I was in there, I decided to see what else showed up in the Ubuntu Mobile boot. One thing caught my eye:
/media/flashdrive/etc/init.d/samsung-q1-ultra-keycode-setup
Nice! That will get my buttons going! I put that in my /etc/init.d and added the matching symlink from etc/rc3.d to my own rc3.d

Of course, I still didn't have a /dev/input/wacom so I needed to make one:
After some poking, I decided to borrow /etc/udev/rules.d/60-xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules and put it on the Ubuntu install.

At this point (after a reboot) I discovered that my touchscreen registered mouse clicks and double-clicks, but did not track around the screen. Google led me to this great page, but I was still having difficulty and the calibration tool did not run properly.

I took a break after that and did some other work. I intended to set up the SD card reader as swap space, but made a couple typos and fried my partition table on the hard drive. This experiment is paused for now. I'll return to it next weekend after I settle in to my new apartment. Hope this helps somebody!