Tuesday, June 19, 2007

FujitsuSiemens TabletPC button module

There is, since some months, a new project to support the buttons of Fujitsu Siemens TabletPCs (T- and P-series machines with FUJ02bf pnp devices) including the 'Application Panel'. The project called fjbtndrv provide a kernel module to get the tablet button and the brightness key events via the input layer (/dev/input/event*).

Additionally, and this is IMO the best, the module catch the tablet rotation event from convertible FSC TabletPCs. This allow us now to detect the state of the tablet (open/rotated-closed) and react on the event e.g. in KDE via KRandRTray and rotate the screen. Together with IBM/Lenovo we have now a way for machines of two major manufacturers to go a step forward with TabletPCs.

I packaged a KMP rpm for openSUSE 10.3/factory. You can download the rpm (fsc_btns-kmp) as always from my home project in the openSUSE build service. The package get later included into the SUSE distribution.

What are my next planed steps to improve TabletPC support?
  1. extend the wacom X.org driver to rotate automatically with XRandR extension
  2. extend KRandRTray to:
    • get rotation events
    • get events from rotate hotkeys
    • allow the user to configure if and how to rotate the screen on these events
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