Uber Geeky!

Well it’s been a while, but I once again have a useful nugget of information for the world. I bought a cheap Eee Top last year, and installed Ubuntu on it. It did have a few minor dramas. I wasted days trying to get the touchscreen working, with limited and unreliable results. I actually suspect Ubuntu was having issues with the USB bus since I was getting spammed with dmsg log entries in the terminal window. Sometimes my USB keyboard or mouse would stop working.

Anyway it was depressing and I don’t want to go into it too much now I’ve got my mojo back on the latest version of Ubuntu, which is working awesomely. This time it took me only 30 minutes to find some working instructions to get the touchscreen up and running. No package compiling required this time, though there was xorg config file hacking involved.

Here’s the procedure on an out of the box Lucid Lynx install. Install the evtouch driver.

$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-evtouch

Tell udev to create us the symlink for the touchscreen device.

$ echo 'echo KERNEL==\"event*\", SUBSYSTEM==\"input\", ATTRS{idVendor}==\"1bfd\", ATTRS{idProduct}==\"1688\", SYMLINK+=\"input/evtouch\" > /etc/udev/rules.d/69-touchscreen.rules' | sudo sh

Now I was surprised to discover I didn’t have an xorg.conf file. I found you can generate one with “X -configure” command. The catch is you need to kill GDM before you do so. So here’s the drill:

Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login to the terminal

$ sudo killall gdm-binary

$ sudo X -configure

Now copy the generated xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Edit xorg.conf so it looks similar to mine (changes highlighted):

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "X.org Configured"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
	InputDevice    "Touch0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
	FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
	FontPath     "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
	FontPath     "built-ins"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "dri"
	Load  "dri2"
	Load  "glx"
	Load  "record"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Touch0"
	Driver		"evtouch"
	Option		"device"	"/dev/input/evtouch"
	Option		"MinX"	"1"
	Option		"MinY"	"1"
	Option		"MaxX"	"4096"
	Option		"MaxY"	"4096"
	Option		"ReportingMode" "Raw"
	Option	"Emulate3Buttons" "false"
	Option	"Emulate3Timeout" "50"
	Option	"SendCoreEvents" "on"
	Option	"MoveLimit" "0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
	ModelName    "Monitor Model"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: : integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"           	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ColorKey"           	# 
        #Option     "CacheLines"         	# 
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"            	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "DRI"                	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoDDC"              	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShowCache"          	# [<bool>]
        #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"       	# 
        #Option     "PageFlip"           	# [<bool>]
	Identifier  "Card0"
	Driver      "intel"
	VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
	BoardName   "Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
	BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Card0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     1
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     4
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     8
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     15
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     16
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection