Menu

Surviving your Winbook experience

Enabling the built-in onscreen keyboard

  1. Go to system settings either by clicking the gear in the left toolbar or the gear in the upper right
  2. Select Universal Access
  3. Go to the Typing tab
  4. Switch the On Screen Keyboard setting to "ON." You may have to drag the window to the left first because of the winbook's display width.

Adjusting the onscreen keyboard settings

  1. Trigger the onscreen keyboard by either doing the above or running the command "onboard" in a terminal window
  2. Click the most bottom right button on the onscreen keyboard (looks like horizontal lines)
  3. Click the new red settings icon towards the left of the keyboard. This should open onboard preferences
  4. Here you can make it auto show when editing text, change the layout/configuration, and make it dock to the screen edge

Together these things should make it pretty easy to navigate ubuntu like a regular tablet, sans keyboard.

Making the window manager more responsive

It seems like the default settings for compiz, the X window manager that controls how windows work, tend to bog down the winbook. Here's how to make it less intense.

  1. Run sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager to install a program that lets you tweak compiz settings
  2. From the ubuntu dash (first thing on the taskbar), start typing compiz and launch the compiz settings manager
  3. Disable things you don't need. Be careful not to disable so much as to make unity unusable though. I disabled copy to texture, desktop wall, viewport switcher, animations, and fading windows and that seemed to speed things up a lot. You could probably get away with more if you're careful

Avoid the overagressive key repeat setting

By default, the staff winbook seemed to enter the repeat letter when a key is held mode too agressively, resulting in things like sudo reboooooooooot. You can adjust the setting by:

  1. Go to system settings either by clicking the gear in the left toolbar or the gear in the upper right
  2. Select Keyboard
  3. Drag the key repeat sliders around or disable it altogether

Avoid auto locking the account, which makes you enter your password again

  1. Go into system settings
  2. Select Brightness & Lock
  3. Turn Lock off

Clearing or disabling "System Problem Detected"

Do this at your own risk, since disabling the feature entirely can hide actual problems.

  1. See this stackoverflow post