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

Hunting for a job as linux developer?

Are you seeking for a job as a open source software developer? Do you have experience with Linux and are you interested in develop software for Linux? You have knowledge of technologies related to laptops/mobile devices as e.g. WLAN, ACPI, Bluetooth, HAL, power management, device drivers or data synchronisation? You are a good C/C++ developer?

Then the SUSE/Novell Mobile Devices Team has probably a interesting job offer for you. We are looking for a talented, energetic Software Developer to increase our team. You can find the full job description here. SUSE offer competitive salaries and benefits. As far as I know the job location is not necessarily Prague.

If this sound interesting to you, mail us your application documents (for contact see here) and feel free to let me know.

Tech Tags: SUSE

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.

Tech Tags: TabletPC Patches

KPowersave Test Cases

To improve the quality of KPowersave I've wrote some test cases for the most important functionality and features of KPowersave and added them to a test plan in the internal Novell Testopia system.

Since Testopia isn't available for external people I've added the same test cases to the SVN repository of KPowersave (see here) so that every interested person can follow the instructions and report bugs and regressions. You can get the test case also as a tar.bz2 package from ftp or as plain text files here.

All cases are about KPowersave running under KDE3. Every test run, against the latest KPowersave (SVN) version, and bugreport (with the number or name of the failed test case) would be appreciated.

Tech Tags: KPowersave

HAL 0.5.11 released

Yes, it's a delayed blog entry ... I forgot to blog as I officially announced HAL v0.5.11 and a hal-info package (20080805) last month.

You can download the source packages here:

• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-0.5.11.tar.gz
• http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/hal-info-20080508.tar.gz

A list with all changes since the last release can you find here or in the announcement email on the HAL mailing list.

Thanks to all contributors, testers and bugreporters which helped during the (too) long release cycle. I hope we see the next release faster (than the 8 months between 0.5.10 and the actual version).

Small note for openSUSE user: this HAL/hal-info version is already part of the upcoming openSUSE 11.0.

Tech Tags: HAL