Well… the weather is getting better, so I’ve been working on improving the software on my carputer.. since the gentoo installation was getting annoying to maintain and update, and the hardware works quite well (except for that stupid touchscreen!). So I installed the alpha version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) on it.. and its worked out quite well. I’ve used Ubuntu before, but its a totally different experience than Gentoo (though, the Gentoo experience definitely taught me a TON about Linux).

One problem I was having with the touchscreen was that if you turned it off, then evtouch would no longer talk to it and things wouldn’t work correctly anymore. So… this last week or so I was looking into it, and it resulted in this patch I created for xorg/HAL input hotplugging (xorg mailing list link here). Hopefully they put it into the next release or so… it would make hotplugging a lot easier with xorg.

Another problem is that a normal desktop is really annoying to navigate with a crappy touchscreen, so I was looking into what I could do to create a better interface… but then I found Ubuntu Mobile. Despite the shiny screenshots on their pages, it doesn’t look like its all completely implemented yet, and the default install environment has a really ugly background. Of course, its also still very alpha with a number of bug, so its not quite usable yet. I’ll have to hack on it. 🙂

So… in the future, expect to see my carputer section get totally revamped. One of the great things about Ubuntu is that most things *just work*, so that should make life a lot easier. And, hopefully it’ll work a lot better in a virtual machine than my gentoo install did (it had issues because of arch-specific optimizations… and I didn’t feel like recompiling EVERYTHING again… ).