Dell Totem support / libinput bug: Event for missing capability CAP_POINTER on device "Advanced Silicon S.A. CoolTouch® System System Multi Axis"

[Peter Hutterer]

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 09:05:55AM +0200, Max Maischein wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I got a Dell Canvas+Totem widget (on clearance, they are discontinued),
> and got the following error message when running `libinput debug-events`:
> 
> libinput bug: Event for missing capability CAP_POINTER on device
> "Advanced Silicon S.A. CoolTouch® System System Multi Axis"
> 
> The recorded sequence is "drop the totem on the screen, click it (this
> is where the error shows up), lift it again", recorded using
> 
> libinput record /dev/input/event9 -o dell-totem-drop-click-lift-20210510.yml
> 
> Is there anything more I can do to help? I'd really like to use the
> totem as a secondary mouse/tool, but so far, it "only" gets detected as
> a primary mouse (without configuration or anything, so that's really
> great already).

best to file an issue against libinput, debugging over email is pretty
terrible.

> Is there anything more I can do to help? I'd really like to use the
> totem as a secondary mouse/tool, but so far, it "only" gets detected as
> a primary mouse (without configuration or anything, so that's really
> great already).

fwiw, if the device is indeed detected as totem, then you can't do...
anything. The totem is a tablet tool and exposed as such - without
client-side support to map that tool into something else you cannot use it
for anything (that would require compositor, wayland and toolkit support).
And the amount of effort required to add bimanual interaction to
applications is, let's just say "nontrivial" :)

That's the main reason totem support never got past the libinput API, the
number of people using them is so close to zero that it just wasn't worth
the effort.

Cheers,
   Peter