Tablet PC under ubuntu

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Hi, as an user of a tablet pc under ubuntu, I have to say that this
distribution can work very well with tablet pcs. Cellwriter and xournal
are already there and they are very good. 

The only problem is that currently in both hardy and intrepid tablet
activation requires manual intervention on the xorg.conf file. This is
particularly bad as intrepid is supposed to hotplug devices, but for
tablet pcs you never plug anything in, so I suppose this is the reason
why I still have to manually edit xorg.conf.

In the current situation it is unclear to me what should work and what
not, and how input hotplugging is supposed to work, so I don't even know
which bugs to report. The new X architecture constrained me to do
guessworking on how the xorg.conf file is structured (keyboard and mouse
are no longer there). Copying an old file from previous releases didn't
well. 

What I had to do was very counterintuitive to me: I added three
"InputDevice" sections to xorg.conf as usual, and then a ServerLayout
like the following one

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier	"Default Layout"
	Screen		"Default Screen"
	InputDevice     "stylus"	"SendCoreEvents"
	InputDevice     "cursor"	"SendCoreEvents"
	InputDevice     "eraser"	"SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

where I don't specify mouse and keyboard. As I see it, if I specify a
serverlayout then I also specify mouse and keyboard. If I don't specify
it, then the server makes a choice for me. The above mixture is not so
coherent however it works. I attach my full xorg.conf (toshiba tablet
m400) for further reference.

Old releases of ubuntu had tablet input pre-configured in xorg, this was
removed without too much discussion I think one year ago, for good
reasons but without identifying an alternative (for example, a checkbox
in the mouse preference to activate the tablet).

What is the current status and the current plan to enable tablet pcs to
work with ubuntu? Notice that the required effort may be really minimal
and the overall image gain of ubuntu high. Other distributions such as
suse already support tablet pcs by default. 

Vincenzo Ciancia

-------------- next part --------------
# xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
#   sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier      "Default Screen"
	Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
	Device          "Configured Video Device"
#	SubSection "Display"
#	Virtual	2800 1050
#	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver		"wacom"
	Identifier	"stylus"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
	Option		"Type"		"stylus"
	Option		"ForceDevice"	"ISDV4"		# Tablet PC ONLY
	Option        "Button2"       "3"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver		"wacom"
	Identifier	"eraser"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
	Option		"Type"		"eraser"
	Option		"ForceDevice"	"ISDV4"		# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver		"wacom"
	Identifier	"cursor"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
	Option		"Type"		"cursor"
	Option		"ForceDevice"	"ISDV4"		# Tablet PC ONLY
	Option        "Button1"       "2"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier	"Default Layout"
	Screen		"Default Screen"
	InputDevice     "stylus"	"SendCoreEvents"
	InputDevice     "cursor"	"SendCoreEvents"
	InputDevice     "eraser"	"SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
EndSection