TabletPCs: support for WACOM USB Tablets

Great news: the linuxwacom package supports now also TabletPCs with internal USB WACOM tablet devices. This means there is now support for e.g. the ASUS R1F or the Hewlett-Packard tx2000z/tx2130ea/tx2500z.

To get the tablet supported you need a new version of the wacom kernel module. I've added a new wacom-kmp package to my openSUSE Build Service project with an updated version of the module including a working version for kernel 2.6.26. The package is available for openSUSE 10.2/10.3/11.0 and factory. You should also update x11-input-wacom to the latest version from the same repo.

Currently I'm working on an updated and extended version of SaX2 to easily configure also these TabletPCs. As soon as I've a new SaX2 package available I'll announce it here.

Tech Tags: TabletPC

Lenovo ThinkPad X61t Touch support

As I already wrote in the last post the linuxwacom driver now works with Touch devices as used in the Lenovo ThinkPad X61t. Today I tried to use the touch device, but unfortunately it's not full working with default settings as the other wacom input devices on TabletPCs. By default you can only use a part of the screen, the cursor never reaches the last 2-3 cm to the border of the screen.

I tried to calibrate the device with wacomcpl but I got alway an error. The reason was that wacomcpl wrongly detected all wacom input devices as core devices. I had to fix wacomcpl first, you can find the patch here.

Sadly also the fixed version of wacomcpl wasn't able to calibrate the touch device correctly. The touch device get active as soon as you hit the display with you finger or a non-EMR pen. This get interpreted by wacomcpl as click, you don't have a chance to put the cursor on the cross to get a value for calibration. Because of this I played around with xsetwacom and the ButtomX/Y and TopX/Y options on the X61t. Here the values I added to my SaX2 version to get the device usable:

Option "BottomX" "915"
Option "BottomY" "950"
Option "TopX" "48"
Option "TopY" "79"

I hope this make the X61t now usable. You can get updated SaX2 and x11-input-wacom packages here. But it would be nice if the autocalibration in the driver could get fixed including wacomcpl.

Tech Tags: TabletPC SaX2 openSUSE

openSUSE: Better TabletPC support

Since a while some newer TabletPCs uses Wacom Tablets with Multitouch support which allows to use the Tablet with the pen but also with your fingers as a Touchscreen. One example is the Lenovo ThinkPad X61t.

The linuxwacom X11 driver now also provides touch support. It's realised as a new input device with option "Type" "touch". These devices work only on TabletPCs and with the option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4".

Since SaX2 currently only supports the configuration of the Stylus (Pen) and the Eraser devices I had to extend Sax2 to allow also the configuration of Touch devices. You can find my patch here and an updated SaX2 package (for openSUSE >= 10.2) in my openSUSE Build Service home repo (you need also the latest x11-input-wacom packages from there to get the full support).

Here a screenshot of the new 'Electronic Pens' tab of SaX2 from a Lenovo X61t:

If you have an other TabletPC with Wacom Multitouch support feel free to send me an email with your xorg.conf and some information about the machine and I add the machine to SaX2, so that you be able to configure your machine very easily.

Tech Tags: TabletPC SaX2 openSUSE

Fixing UMTSmon Sierra Wireless port detection

Yesterday I tried the first time to run UMTSmon on a HP Compaq 2710p TabletPC with a HP HS2300 HSDPA Broadband Wireless module (which is a Sierra Wireless). Unfortunately I couldn't unlock the SIM card with the correct PIN, while it worked under Windows and on a HP Compaq 2510p which has the same UMTS card.

With some hints/help from Seife I found out that the ttyUSB* ports for PPP and AT are twisted (compared to the 2510p). Since the cards in both machines have the same USB vendor and product id UMTSmon can't differ between both cases.

To solve this problem I added some code to UMTSmon to identify the PPP port from the output of the ATI command. The answer of the PPP port contains 'APP1\n'. This allows for Sierra Wireless cards with two ttyUSB ports to find always the correct port. You can find the patch on the UMTSmon mailing list or here.

Tech Tags: Patches UMTSmon

HAL patch collection (5)

Here my actual HAL patch collection. I didn't send them to the HAL ML yet, but I try as soon as I find the time.

• a patch to fix handling of PMU battery and AC if the devices are available via the power_supply kernel interface to fix problems with duplicated devices from the proc interface (should also fix fd.o#15482)
  
• patch for fd.o#16427 to fix the PropertyModified signal in SPEC to do what the code already do
• small memory leak fix
• a patch to remove the storage.model property from all volume devices (it's always empty and should be only part of devices which use the storage namespace)
• a bigger patch to cleanup the code of some addons, removed check_priv() from the addons and added it to a new file to be able to simply reuse it for all addons if needed
• a patch to prevent get truncated model strings for some IDE devices (I think it's atm not the final version of the patch, this need some more testing)
• a patch to fix the FDI match directive for the uint64 type (fd.o#16575)

I wrote also two patches to improve the performance of HAL. These patches move some often used stuff from the scripts to addons to prevent multiple (at least 2-3) forks for each DBus method call. The patches are:

• one for the generic kernel backlight interface
  
• and another for the Intel WLAN (ipw) killswitch interface

These patches are against current HAL git or against the v0.5.11 sources. If a link to a patch doesn't work, the patch was maybe moved to this directory. The patches are already part of the HAL package in my openSUSE Factory buildservice repo.

Tech Tags: HAL Patches