Hdaps Broken In Ubuntu (Intrepid), Again…

For the last one or two months I’ve been running the alpha releases of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on my Thinkpad X61 Tablet, and I’ve found that many things got broken. However I will not blog about them right now, since Ubuntu Intrepid is still in the “testing” phase and so it won’t be fair to complain about the bugs at this stage. However there is one problem that affects me greatly; the hdaps module responsible for reading data off the accelerometer does not work. Since this a very important feature of the tablet, if combined with automatic screen rotation (a much improved script coming soon, I promise!), I figured others would be interested in knowing how to fix it.

But first, a description of the problem. If you have tried Interpid and tested hdaps module via the hdaps-gl or hdaps-pivot application, you would find that no matter how you move your laptop, the module will give you the same value over and over again.. Right now I have no idea why the problem is happening, but others have come across it too and there is a bug report for it opened on Launchpad.

The fix for this problem is quite “simple”; you just have to download the sources to the module (found with the tpctl project, more specifically the tp_smapi packge) recompile manually. If you do not know how to accomplish that, I suggest that you try the guide that I wrote during Hardy Heron’s trouble with the hdaps module. The only difference is that you will have to make sure to use tp_smapi version 0.39 or greater, as anything below that is not compatible with the 2.6.17 kernel shipped with Ubuntu Intrepid. Of course, the guide has been already modified to reflect this.

If (or should I say when) Ubuntu fixes this problem in their version of the hdaps module, I will make sure to write a follow-up post. Another alternative to receiving a fast update is to subscribe to the actual bug report mentioned earlier.