Sailfish/IconiaTabW500

Heavily inspired by the port on ExoPC

Install Sailfish SDK Emulator on Acer Iconia tab W500

The Iconia tab W500 is a nice but obsolete X86 tablet computer. It is powered with an AMD fusion APU. Hardware adaptation is close to the one of the Exo PC, with AMD drivers for display.

Initial setup

Remember, if you want to access BIOS, and boot from USB, you need a keyboard plugged, and have to boot the tablet by holding the Windows button and power button.

First you need to extract the root filesystem from the emulator VirtualBox image. This is done by simply running

VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw sailfishos.vdi sailfish.raw

in the folder where the virtual disk (sailfishos.vdi) is.

After that, you need to load this image on the Iconia tab. You can dump it on an USB drive, like with the Exo PC with

sudo dd if=sailfish.raw of=/dev/sd* bs=4M
sync

the mount it, edit /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf to boot from sdb1 and add rootwait, or simply install it directly on the tablet. For that, I first installed a Linux distribution on it (Fedora 18), and re partitionned the disk to allocate 2 gigs to Sailfish, then, from Fedora, I copied the content of the image to that partition. If you do that, be sure to change the fstab of the sailfish image (root as /dev/sda2), and add an entry to Fedora bootloader.

Boot in Sailfish. There, no display should work. Go in a tty (CTRL+ALT+F2) and log in as nemo/nemo. Wifi should work out of the box, so configure the Wifi with

/usr/lib/connman/test/test-connman enable wifi
/usr/lib/connman/test/test-connman scan wifi
/usr/lib/connman/test/test-connman list
etc.

Now you are ready for hardware adaptation.

Hardware adaptation

Be sure to have wifi working. First, you need to add the HW adaptation repository.

zypper ar http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/sfietkonstantin:/iconia/Mer_Core_i586/home:sfietkonstantin:iconia.repo
zypper in mesa-x86-radeon
zypper in mesa-x86-radeon-dri-radeon-driver
zypper in kernel-adaptation-iconia
zypper in xorg-x11-drv-ati

If you are using the bootloader of another Linux distribution, be sure to reedit it and allow to boot from the new kernel. You can remove the old one as well.

After that, you should remove the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/x86-vm.conf. After rebooting, the display should be launched, and something appear on screen. But HW acceleration is not here yet.

You have to edit /var/lib/environment/nemo/50-jolla-ui, and add the following variables

EGL_PLATFORM=x11
EGL_DRIVER=egl_dri2
MCOMPOSITOR_USE_TFP=1

You also have to edit /var/lib/environment/nemo/60-emul-ui and check if it contains

EGL_PLATFORM=x11
EGL_DRIVER=egl_dri2

You can add -nocursor in OPTIONS in that file, to remove the cursor.

Finally, you need to add in /usr/lib/systemd/user/lipstick.service

Environment=QT_DEFAULT_RUNTIME_SYSTEM=

Then everything should work, including glows.

Finishing touches

Edit /usr/lib/qt4/imports/Sailfish/silica/ApplicationWindow.qml and set the size of the window to the one of the screen

//width: _transpose ? screen.height : screen.width (comment those two lines)
//height: _transpose ? screen.width : screen.height
width: 1280
height: 800

You can make the display to be in portrait by changing the GConf entry. Run the following command as nemo/nemo

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/jolla/components/screen_rotation_angle --type int 90