U810 Elisa and another resource

This chap has cooked up a tablet mouse driver and a patch for the keyboard lights - nice work - though I disagree about what to do with the Ctrl-Alt-Del button!

Elisa now works - it doesn't like python-twisted 8.10 which is what comes out-of-the-box with OpenSuSE 11.0. Simply go into Yast|Software Management and remove all the twisted-* packages (tell it to ignore all the dependency warnings, we're going to put it back!). Then download the 2.50 version from the twisted site into a directory of your choice.

Unzip it, then go into the top level directory and do a make build followed by a make install and there you are.

~/.elisa/elisa.conf even has a touchscreen setting which lets you whizz through lists depending on the speed you stroke the screen - though the poor U810 struggles a bit when you go too fast.

Beware that elisa defaults to having it's caches/databases in ~/.elisa so if you want to share it between user accounts you'll want to adjust that to avoid duplication. The Album cover retrieval from Amazon is a bit hit and miss too.

U810 Buttons and Touchscreen Part 2

Have done some hacking to the fsc_btns code and now it can detect a U-series system using DMI and locate the button controller which gives me access to the three buttons at the bottom of the screen, the dedicated Ctrl-Alt-Del button and the Up-Fn-Down triplet by the mouse nub. Now I just need to decide which keycodes to assign to them and work out how to make the Fn button a sticky modifier key. Then I'll feed the code back to the sourceforge project.

While testing for scancodes and events to work out which key is which, I've verified that the volume control rocker generates the correct scancodes but the Fn-A/S/D screen controls generate nothing (so more work required then).

As audio volume doesn't work, the Intel audio config is obviously stuffed. There's a longish page in the OpenSuSE support database on this subject to be worked through

Editing code on the U810 has been quite a good exercise in getting used to the keyboard - to the extent that I find myself reaching for Alt-Space on a regular keyboard instead of Tab and trying to use shifted cursor keys. I do think the A-row could be moved over a few mm though (make the :; skinny and you have room for a slightly displaced skinny Tab too). Yes, I have seen the U2010 keyboard.

U810 Buttons and Touchscreen Part 1

The Fujitsu touchscreen Lifebooks are Novell/SuSE certified so where are the drivers? They're not in the released mainstream OpenSuSE distro (10.3) but they have to be somewhere. A bit of digging gets me to the OpenSuSE Tablet PC pages which look rather promising - there's an evtouch package for the touchscreen and a Fujitsu button driver too. The T/P series tablets are mentioned but I'm hoping the U series will be covered too as I doubt Fujitsu would re-engineer a different mechanism unless they really had to. These drivers are currently listed as unsupported but I hope they make it into the mainstream 11.0 release or soon after.

Adding the OpenSuSE Tablet PC Repository to YAST allows us to pull down fsc_btns which looks like a good shot for a button driver (there's also a fair bit of Fujitsu-related activity in the Linux ACPI Project itself so this may be a stopgap). So I attempt to download it and discover it has a dependency on an earlier kernel than the one I have.

Okay, install the basic development packages and kernel source from the main repository and get the fsc_btns source from the SRPMS. Then proceed as follows...

1. cd /usr/src/linux
2. make cloneconfig
3. make modules prepare
4. make coffee, eat lunch :)
   
5. cd /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/fsc_btns
6. make
7. make install
8. modprobe fsc_btns
9. "No such device" :(

Okay, time to look at the source code then...