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.