Pass with caution!

This making me look kind of dumb…but what the hell.

Ever since I had purchase my current laptop since  last year I have been able to configure almost everything to work under Linux. The confounding thing was getting touch screen to work, till now. Partially it was lack of need and partially it was inertia of searching for a workable answer.

The device was recognized out of the box in almost all the distributions that I have tried on this laptop so that was not the issue. Just for sake of completeness this is out put of lsusb:
Bus 002 Device 018: ID 0eef:0001 D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd eGalax TouchScreen

Once in a while I would spend a few hours but never got to getting the touch screen to work beyond the point that it would act as a click button. For instance if I could get the mouse pointer over a button and tapped the screen it would be same as tapping the left mouse button.

Last week I traveled by a train to Mumbai (Bombay for those who still live in the 20th century) and had idle time at hand. This note boot also has a flip screen and can be used as a reader, say for PDF files, and keeping in full screen mode i could read a longish document. All I had to do to change a page was to tap on screen. But the full working of touch screen eluded me.

Then yesterday I got pointed to a link at the LTSP mailing list as a solution for using touch screens in terminals. When i opened the link it was the “Eureka” moment and I quickly headed to  http://home.eeti.com.tw/ and suffred a while till the flash upload was over and then navigated to http://home.eeti.com.tw/web20/TouchKitDriver/linuxDriver.htm Lo and Behold (over dramatized?) here was a complete driver by the manufacturer himself and whaich was rally easy to install.

Dowloaded and extracted the tar file in a directory. Changing to that directory showed a executable shell file and also the sources. A simple execute as a shell installed the driver and only question I really had to answer was what type of touch screen device is there. Choosing type as USB was really a no brainer. The shell script also blacklists usbtouch module that would other wise get loaded.

After install instruction were to restart the computer but I was smarter. I just restarted the GDM service. This proved that I was not smart after all since the device would work only after the driver is loaded. So playing safe this time I rebooted (could have got it to work with modprobe I guess). After the first boot you have to run TouchKit utilitythat is also installed to caliberate the screen and this has to be done under sudo or as root.

Caliberation involved touching the stylus at few places on the screen as asked. Now this also where it shows how dumb I had been as these are the home pages of Egalax the very manufacturer of touch screen on my laptop and all this while I had not visited there site ever even to see if they had any support for Linux!!

I am now happy using Xournal – an application which can take my jottings directly and export them as PDF files. Theis application also is supposed to let me annotate PDF’s but I have not tried that yet.

Key message: Do not blindly follow ‘experts’ if they say that an application will only run under Windows. Give it a try and you will end up saving money and a few headaches by using a Linux roll out.

MotorCraft is running one “Dealership” and three “Service Masters” centres for Maruti Suzuki in Noida and Sahibabad area of NCR. Service Masters are the highest rated service provider outside of Maruti’s own service centre and undergo a constant audit and inspections to ensure quality of service to meet highest customer expectations. MotorCraft has won “Best Performance” award for many years in a row. The company web site is at http://www.motorcraft.in

As with any service industry, information is the key and to make sure that this is available throughout the centres the use of computers is a must. Inventory checks, price request for customers and maintaining work flow from job card creation to billing all this is done using a network of workstations. Not only is the service to be done with high standards, there are the usual customer handling issues as well. The biggest challenge being meeting the high influx of vehicle drop-in (people leaving their vehicles for service) in the morning and pick-ups in the evening. In the morning, accuracy of making job-cards is crucial to plan the service and in the evening invoicing becomes a high demand job. A high quality service requires a good quality hardware and software network.

For computerisation the very first costs are procurement of hardware and software and to get savings many organisations do not fully comply with software licensing. In the past faced with similar situation MotorCraft decided to try out Linux technology for their operations. After seeing a proof-of-concept demo including running the AutoMate application on a Linux server MotorCraft was convinced. A network was established using thin-clients at each location that run from a single desktop machine converted to a Linux server, mail and internet gateway. All the old machines were converted to thin clients and this re-cycling helped extend life of P-I’s and P-II’s and high savings of more than Rupees Ten lacs in capital costs. Other advantage has been complete protection from virus attacks and ability to do complete system management by taking care of only one machine per location leading to reduced manpower and maintenance costs.

Recently Maruti started migrating all their network of dealership and service to on line application Dealership Management System (DMS) using web-server model. Under this system all data is kept on Maruti servers which run oracle database and oracle forms query. All changes are on line and all work done at dealers end is instantly available for analysis and history. For this application to run the dealers network is connected to Maruti network either through dedicated fibre lines, where possible, or through VPN client running on ADSL links.

Since Wipro installation personnel had no background of Linux system they had “decreed” that only Windows XP with IE-6 or higher would have to be deployed to run DMS which would have meant approximate investment of Rupees Twelve lacs across the company.

So a plan was made at MotorCraft to do a test installation for running DMS on Linux system and asking installation engineers, who were not comfortable with Linux, to use a single machine using Window XP and IE-6 browser. Once the application migration demonstration was completed it was run on the existing server without any problem.

Thus MotorCraft was able to continue working without having to:
1.Dump old hardware
2.Buy new work stations with Windows XP and licenses.
3.Spend for and deploy anti-virus and other firewall software.

MotorCraft saves time, money and effort by simply extending their existing Linux systems. As with most web applications it is not really material that you run one or the other operating system but what is more important that the system should have ease of configuration and give least problems to users. Today it costs less than Rs 3,500 – including hardware and software – to roll out a new user workstation at any of their locations which translates in to huge money saved when you are approaching a total count of 100 workstations!

Footnote: I consulted at MotorCraft for their migration and use of Linux. This article was carried by Linux for You magazine in their May 2008 issue and also contains some more technical details..

Technorati Tags: linux, migration