Touch Screen Issues

[Brandon Kuczenski]

Hello all,

I want to inquire about the state of touchscreen development in Ubuntu. 
  I recently built a touch-screen-only system running Karmic and I'm 
generally happy with it (the OS is pretty heavy weight, lots of caching 
to disk, etc, but that is the way of things in this Aero-Aqua-world) but 
the touch screen support is lacking.  I'm using xorg-input-evtouch.

1- No click and drag!! This is an absolute killer.  Many UI features 
don't work at all without click and drag.  What's worse, I *know* the 
capability is there because when I move a window using right-click-> 
move, or resize using right-click->resize, click and drag works (albeit 
awkwardly).

2- I have to start Xorg twice in order for the touchscreen calibration 
to load.  I don't know why this is, but I suspect that the config 
settings (which are currently loaded in /etc/init.d) should be loaded 
from somewhere within the Xsession (doesn't X handle the touchscreen?). 
  This problem is very bad because, when the touch screen doesn't work 
the first time, it is impossible to exit gnome.  I have to restart gdm 
via ssh.  I have to do this every time the computer boots.  If I didn't 
have sshd running, I would not be able to use the system at all without 
a physical mouse.

3- I'm using onboard for my onscreen keyboard.  It takes 5 seconds to 
start.  Surely I could do with a bit more RAM in the machine (1GB not 
enough?) but is there some way for me to force it to stay in memory?

3a- it would be really nice, since it's so much trouble to move the 
onboard window (no click and drag), if onboard would show the text 
that's been typed so far in some kind of display space, since often 
onboard itself appears in front of the cursor location.

3b- onboard doesn't have a man page.

Mostly I'm sending this post as a trial to see if I should file bugs for 
any of these.

Thanks for your input.  Thanks for making ubuntu.

-Brandon