Hi there, question on Touch Screen and the X11 Server

[Inden Sawer]

Hi there everyone,

I am a newbie in the world of X11 and I am trying to find out the simplest and most efficient solution for this rather unique issue I am addressing. 

Basically, this embeded system I am working on uses a kdrive X11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdrive) that is integrated into a 2.6.18 Debian Linux kernel. This system does not use the xorg.conf for configuration and does not seem to have an active X server running.  The embedded box has an HDMI output for display and has USB and serial ports.

So this is where my issue resides. I am trying to get several touch screen monitors to work with this embedded box. 

I am looking into screens made by vendors such as 3M and Elo , and the way their Linux drivers work is to have an X11 touch-screen module ( usually .o file placed under /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/ ) and adding an InputDevice entry for the touchscreen in the xorg.conf file. An example of what I describe for the touch driver installation process is right here for a 3M touch screen : http://www.conan.de/touchscreen/evtouch.html

Now, if my kdrive X11 does not even use an xorg.conf file or an active X11 server, I am trying to find a workaround solution, and here are two that I am considering :

(1) Ask the firmware developer for each touch screen vendor to build a special driver that will call the XTestFake functions from the X11/extensions/Xtest.h ( http://linux.die.net/man/3/xtestfakemotionevent ) to simulate fake mouse events. I have experimented this already with one particular touch screen where I made a special driver that would read in the touch-screen data via serial and then call the specific XTestFake functions to move the mouse pointer on-screen.  The problem with this approach is that I would have to consult the firmware developer for each touch screen I plan to support for my system, since I wouldn't want to write the driver myself for ALL the screens. 

(2) Allow each touch screen vendor to use their original drivers and then on my end, I can build some form of a middleware that can accept the original drivers and still be able to use XTestFake to emulate the necessary mouse events. I was wondering if a good suggestion would be to use Xfvb ? Will it complicate the fact that this system already uses kdrive?

Please enlighten a fellow X11 newb here. I just want to carefully consider my options before going too far down either path

Thanks!

I.S.


      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20090305/d6de983e/attachment.html>