webdt.org

Hi All,

I have been playing around with puppy linux on dt366 and it works very well with one major exception. The DT research touch screen drives do not work. Puppy 4.2 uses X 1.3 and the drives do not load. I have found some open source drivers (evtouch and penmount) these load but the point is just all over the place. Interestingly the device /dev/ttyS0 seems to send a stream of output ( tested with cat < /dev/ttyS0) so maybe this is just a calibration issue.

If anyone has an old 'official' penmount driver for X 1.3 or has got the open source driver working. Let me know.

Dave.

At some point the driver for the touchscreen became included within X. I have had luck on non supported operating systems and have had the same results with a pointer in need of calibration.

I thought it was interesting that penmount had me use the ubuntu 8.04 driver for slackware 12.2. They gave me a how to with a few items to change in the penmount.ini file that came in the driver package.

Another source told me that basically all we need to do is line up the kernel version with the calibration utility/driver. On the penmount download page they go al the way back to Suse-8.0 and Fedora core 2. I'll bet with some trial and error you can find a driver in there aimed at the kernel you are running to get that pointer calibrated.

quotaholic

@david_halliday


Did you have any luck with the touchscreen in puppy linux? I'm running puppy 4.3 and it runs great except, of course, for the touchscreen.

I'm using those same open-source drivers ('evdev' & 'penmount') after following the HOWTO on the puppy forums. Not only is the calibration awful, but the behaviour of the pointer is very erratic.

Changing 'MinX', 'MaxX', etc in the Xorg.conf does affect the touchscreen, so that's a start... But finding the correct values seems almost impossible. The erratic movement is almost as if the analog-to-digital converter from the touchscreen is set to the wrong bit setting (eg: 8bit instead of 10bit).

The official calibration tools from Penmount don't seem to communicate with the open-source driver - I get the same calibration values no matter where I touch. However, a useful tool to test your calibration is the 'gDraw' tool in one of their drivers (I forget which one sorry). This tool makes the whole screen a drawing pad so that you can play around without accidentally launching icons on your desktop.

Did you get anywhere?

I have been super busy these past couple of months so had to put all my dt hacking on ice. With luck I will brush it off again in the coming weeks. It looks like there is a new puppy out, it seems to use a later X so that may make things go smoother.

Dave.

Sorry - I should have said that I am using Puppy 4.3 - apparently the latest.

I also tried installing the "Xorg-full" puppy package, but that didn't change anything.

(oh yeah - and I have a newborn as well, so I know how hard it is to find hacking time! :-)  )

I got this all working in Puppy 4.3! Quite easily too.

See my post:

forum/viewtopic.php?t=0