Ground Control

I've go to say thanks to Alan who has done a lot of work on the WebBook for this information, you can look him up on his site here.

With Karmic Koala comes a new version of the Linux kernel, new drivers for the Orange HSO 225 dongle (new – not better, more on that in a sec) fancy graphics on startup and shutdown, a slightly modified openchrome display driver (no compiz, sorry) and a host of tweaks and updates to the applications. The Ubuntu One cloud storage is kind of handy for keeping files on a netbook in sync with a desktop too.

So getting it working on the funny display of the webbook is again non-trivial, but this is how to do it. For this you will temporarily need an external monitor with a sensible native resolution such as 1024×768 or 1280×1024. Esoteric resolutions such as my 2048×1152 monitor don’t work so well. Also you need a USB cd rom drive and a copy of Ubuntu 9.10 which you can download and burn to a disk on a Linux computer such as the webbook or on any other operating system such as Mac OS X. You should also go into this in the expectation that you are going to totally trash everything on the disk so do a backup of anything important first.

So plug in the monitor and boot off the CD, you may need to go into the BIOS settings and change the boot order so that it will boot from CD if yours is not already set that way. Go through the install procedure accepting all the defaults, you can dual boot or wipe the disk and use the full space or upgrade the existing install, probably without data loss, but see the previous point about backups. Ignore the screen of the webbook, the external monitor should be working OK at this point. Reboot into your Karmic desktop. At this stage if you boot without the external monitor the webbook screen will be a flashing and flickering mess with nothing remotely useable on it, so lets fix that.

Press Alt+F2 to get up the run program dialog, in here type

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

which will bring up a text editor with an empty file. Type or paste the following:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "OpenChrome"
option "PanelSize" "1024x600"
option "ForcePanel"
EndSection


basically the same as it was for Jaunty, but with option "ForcePanel" added.
Save and exit and reboot and you should have a 1024×600 display that fits perfectly in the panel. If you want to use an external monitor or projector you can change it from 1024×600 to 1024×768 and you will be able to see the top 600 pixels on the webbook screen but the full projector screen should fit. I found some corruption around the mouse cursor on the external monitor, I think there is an option to do a software mouse cursor which should fix this.