[tntc.tig]

When my 2100 arrived, it came with a fairly strange layout on the hard drive. Out of my 16GB ssd, only 10 gigs was dedicated to my / (root) partition. A whole 5gb was dedicated to another partition, containing what appeared to be install files. I thought to myself "Why would I need 5gb (of which only a few hundred megs was used) wasted on my already small solid state drive?" and immediately began installing Ubuntu 9.04. Little did I know that both the touch screen and audio do not work out of the box. I also discovered that reinstalling 8.10 did little to fix this. In an effort to save anyone else a bit of time, I'm going to shed a some light on these problems and explain how to fix them on Ubuntu 8.10 and Ubuntu 9.04. On the second page is a tutorial for Ubuntu 9.10, which has the audio working "Out of the box".

To get the touch screen working on both 9.04 and 8.10, you need to install a package that is in the regular Ubuntu repositories. It is very straight forward: Either go to synaptic and find the package manually (search for evtouch), or type the following into a terminal:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-evtouch

This will pull down all the dependencies required to get the fancy touch screen working. Once you have installed the driver, you will need to restart X for it to take effect. This can be done by logging out and back in.

Once the driver is installed, you will notice a new item under System -> Administration, the aptly named "Calibrate Touchscreen". I found this utility cumbersome to use, but quite effective at getting my touch screen well calibrated to my finger. When you run it, you are instructed to run your pen (in this case your finger) along the edge of the screen. I would suggest doing this ONLY where your finger would naturally be able to touch. If you use your fingernail on the edge of the screen, it will calibrate the screen accordingly, making using scroll bars with the touch screen a pain. Once you have run your finger completely around the screen edges two or three times, press enter. There are several black Xs on the screen. One of these will turn red after a few seconds. You have to look closely at the screen. I'm not sure why they made the Xs colors that are so close visually (dark red and black), but if you're careful and look closely, you can see which X has turned red. Touch each X, and the next one will turn red. Once the calibration is complete, restart your X session. This can be done simply by logging out and then logging back in.

The audio is a whole different story. The stock alsa drivers do not properly detect the microphone embedded in the laptop, and I spent hours trying various model= and probe_mask= and position_fix= options in my alsa-base. This is a waste of time. Search for the realtek-linux-audiopack-5.11 (or look on realtek's website for drivers for the ALC272, the sound chip found in Latitude 2100s. Download this package, and follow the manual instructions in the readme. I was not able to get alsa-utils to compile, but this is not required. I did compile alsa-driver (required for sure) and alsa-libs (maybe required, not so sure, will test).

You will need the build-essential package to do this. Either find it in Synaptic, or run this:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
in a terminal.

There is a section at the end of the readme which tells you to put some lines into /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf file. Instead, put them in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base on Ubuntu 8.10, or /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf in Ubuntu 9.04.

Note for the folks annoyed by my poor detail and lack of howto-making skills: I will update as I can, with more detail and a step-by-step procedure, along with links to the packages required. I found myself frustrated while downloading the Linux package from realtek because one of the mirrors timed out, and two of them were so slow that it took several minutes to download 4MB of data when it would've normally taken less than two seconds.

Update 1: Modified so that the howto reflects that both 8.10 and 9.04 are working.

Update 2: Included requirement of package build-essential

[tntc.tig]

It appears that the same drivers work just fine in Ubuntu 9.04 as well! To get them,
1) Go to www.realktek.com.
2) Click the downloads link at the top
3) Click "High Definition Audio Codecs (Software)"
4) Accept the agreement that says, basically, that you know the manufacturer may provide better drivers.
5) Scroll down to the Unix (Linux) section, and pick a download site. Once you download the drivers, uncompress them into a folder of your choice and follow the Readme included with the drivers.

Direct link to step 4

[tntc.tig]

Hopefully I'm not beating a dead horse with this thread I see a lot of views, so I'm going to continue updating it. Every time ubuntu updates the kernel, you will have to repeat some of the steps to re-compile and re-install the drivers. Basically, I changed directory into the alsa-driver-* folder, and ran:

sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo alsa force-reload.

The actual driver build (sudo make) will take a few minutes.

[KLF]

Curious... did you use the "Netbook Remix" version of 9.04? Or the standard Desktop edition?

[tntc.tig]

I used the standard Ubuntu 9.04 i386 desktop install booting from a flash drive. I don't have a USB CD/DVD drive.

[tntc.tig]

It appears that Realtek has updated their drivers, thereby breaking compatibility with our sound card. I'm going to try to post the drivers here in the next day or so. The version your looking for is the realtek-linux-audiopack-5.11. 5.12 will not have the proper drivers for the internal mic.

[linuxlion]

Originally Posted by tntc.tig

It appears that Realtek has updated their drivers, thereby breaking compatibility with our sound card. I'm going to try to post the drivers here in the next day or so. The version your looking for is the realtek-linux-audiopack-5.11. 5.12 will not have the proper drivers for the internal mic.

I can confirm this also with Fedora 11. The 5.12 version of the audio pack works, but without the mic. You can download the 5.11 version if you edit the download link the website provides. After building the 5.11 version, my mic works. Thank you!

[sarahgrl]

Tntc.tig,

Thanks so much for this post.

I had a similar problem with the mic on my dell Mini 10v Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and used your instructions to get it partially working. I rewrote and added more detail, post is here if anyone is interested.

[tntc.tig]

Those of you waiting for Karmic Koala (9.10) should know that the 5.11 driver doesn't compile under it, at least not as of yesterday.

[reflex]

Thanks for the info. I don't have a Latitude 2100, but since Linux compatibility is my #2 priority in choosing a computer, I like having knowledge of any issues beforehand. (a cheap price is my #1 priority )