Friday, June 13, 2008

TabletPCs: fix for xsetwacom

We had some trouble with rotation of wacom input devices on openSUSE 10.3/11.0 (see bugs #387127, #399016 and #391466) if the screen content get rotated via the XRandR extension.

The source of the problem was the way 'xsetwacom --list' try to identify the configured wacom input devices. The tool try to find them based on the device name (Identifier in xorg.conf) which don't work if you set other names than cursor, stylus, eraser or pad. But this is what SaX2 do if you configure a Tablet, they get named 'Mouse[x]'. Because of this (the patched version of) krandrtray (KDE) and resapplet (GNOME) were no longer able to find the devices which need to get rotated with xsetwacom.

To solve the problem I ported and extended an old patch from Stefan Dirsch from 2005 to the current package/source. With this patch xsetwacom now check the xorg.conf for devices which uses the wacom driver and check then the Type field/option for the device type.

The upcoming openSUSE 11.0 contains the patch already. For older openSUSE releases you can find updated packages in my openSUSE build service repository. All other people can get the patch for v0.7.9 and v0.8.0 of linuxwacom here.
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