ThinkPad X61 Tablet Tilt Detection and Ubuntu Karmic Koala

One of my main beefs with Ubuntu is that the hard drive accelerometer that comes with built in the ThinkPad tablets does not work out of the box. After some research, I found out that this is because the mainline hdaps module (default) and the tp_smapi module (that works, after manual compilation) are different, and the tp_smapi one will not be merged into the mainline for political reasons. That means that to get decent support, one will have to compile the tp_smapi version by hand for some time. About a year ago, I wrote a guide on how to do this. But today, I’ve found out that there is a much simpler way to do this:

sudo aptitude install tp-smapi-source
sudo module-assistant build tp-smapi-source
sudo module-assistant install tp-smapi-source
sudo modprobe hdaps

Note that you will have to rebuild the module after every kernel update.

To actually make it do something useful, like protect the hard disk when moving the laptop, try hdapsd:
sudo aptitude install hdapsd