It took two upgrade cycles — from 7.04 to 7.10 then from 7.10 to 7.04 — to upgrade the P1120 to Xubuntu 8.04. Neither went smoothly, particularly the second upgrade, which choked on installing the en_AU.UTF-8 locale. I have no problem with having an Australian locale, but the computer didn’t like something about this one, and my unattended upgrade stalled shortly after I’d left it to run overnight. Next morning, I had to kill the localedef program, respond to warnings about every program that couldn’t be upgraded because of the bung locale, reboot a couple of times once the upgrade utility had bailed out, and run dpkg --configure -a before everything worked properly again.
The bad news is that hibernate is broken: the laptop hibernates only until you close the lid. The workaround is to hibernate the laptop, then close and reopen the lid, and press the power switch to turn the power off while the laptop is still at the BIOS password screen.
The good news is that the touchscreen works properly. I had used the joytouch utility program with Xubuntu 7.04, but with Xubuntu 8.04, I was able to install the evtouch module (which I’d had to manually build and install back when I was running JDS 3 and hadn’t seen since). The packaged evtouch is still a work in progress: a bug that I hit about the location of the empty_cursor.xbm file for the calibrate.sh utility was fixed in SVN a couple of days ago. Plus there’s plenty of advice in Ubuntu forums and the like about how to get it running. About all that I did that was remotely original was add a line in 69-touchscreen.rules for my particular touchscreen panel:
# Fujitsu Takamisawa USB Touch Panel
KERNEL=="event*", SUBSYSTEM=="input", ATTRS{name}=="Fujitsu Takamisawa USB Touch Panel", SYMLINK+="input/evtouch_event"
And I did that by following instructions.
Now all I need to do is reinvent the GNUS window layout and button buffer setup that I used to use so I could navigate by touchscreen when reading email.