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Good to hear james_jenkins - thanks for taking the time to report so that we know it is at least possible. When you get time...
Here is some of the details until I can put more together.
1. Distro: Slackware 11. Just swap and /. All defaults, FULL package install. About as plain and generic as it gets. No updates of any kind were ran, just straight off of the CD's. The 2.4 kernel is the KEY to this. I picked Slack 11 because it is a current supported version that still uses the 2.4 kernel. The problem with the 2.6 kernel is that support for raw output was removed from the kernel. Unless you put it back in with a patch of some kind, your not going to get far because you can not initialize the touchscreen. We all know how useless computer hardware that fails to initialize is......
Copy "lbtouch_drv.o" to "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input".
DO NOT USE lbtouch-0.7.4.tar.gz. You will be sad because it will cause your cursor to jump around like it is on crack. It will allow you to get raw output from "od /dev/psaux" so you see that your screen is putting out, but if you use lbtouch-0.7.3, you will be much happier.
4. Your xorg.conf has to have the calibration points in it or your so far off that you won't be able to use the top half of the screen. Start with mine to get you going. Notice that the calibrate line is remarked out. Leave it that way unless you are actually at init 3 and running the calibration program. Read the readme's that come with lbtouch. You'll be glad you did. One thing that I found was that the calibrate program didn't quite work as advertised all the way through, but I was able to figure out the dump file and use the correct numbers and make up the ones that it totally screwed up. They are obviously wrong, plus when you get in certain sections of the screen you will suddenly be off quite a bit.
5. Please remember that my CF-28 is the 12 inch TRANSFLECTIVE touchscreen at 800x600. I use it outdoors on wireless broadband installations so I have to be able to read it outside. If your lcd runs at 1024x768, it is the 13.3 inch TRANSMISSIVE touchscreen. You will need to adjust your xorg.conf accordingly for the correct resolution.
6. You will notice in the xorg.conf that there is no reference to the touchpad. That is because the lbtouch driver does both, and if you load a mouse they conflict. You will love that your touchscreen now works, but you will probably not be happy with how the touchpad works. It will work just like a little touchscreen. You can not sweep from one side to the other, and do it again to finish getting your cursor where you want. When you put your finger on the touchpad, it will always move the cursor to that spot on the screen, always, no matter where it was. Basically you just about can not get the cursor to the outer edges of the screen with the touchpad. I made a xorg.conf that has no touchscreen and just switch real quick if I have to use the touchpad.
7. When you are bitching about how the touchpad doesn't work right, just keep reminding yourself how long you worked on getting the touchscreen working, and how nothing else would matter once it worked, and how much you hate those stupid touchpads anyway. That's what I've been doing. And since I'm an IBM tech for ThinkPad's, I really do HATE them. No TrackPoint is the only thing that keeps Toughbooks from being perfect. Rant done.
8. Yes, the touch screen on the CF-28 and 29's are the same as the Toshiba B-series Lifebooks.
9. Someone needs to work on the driver so you can move the cursor incrementally across the screen. The calibration need some work. I'm sure that it probably works like it's suppose to on a Toshiba,but it would be nice to have full funtionality on the Toughbooks.
9. I would also like to see a "Tap and Hold" right click context menu, just like my iPaq. If I could "right click" I would cover the touchpad up with bondo and life would be good.
10. I hope this helps you guys out and gives some of you clever guys some clues that allows you to code some improvements to help us all out.
11. Let me know if you need any logs or outputs, or any further clarifications on anything.
James
Last edited by james_jenkins; 02-20-2007 at 04:46 AM.
Distribution: debian with bits of everything stuck on it
Posts: 114
Rep:
Nice one, good to see the damn thing does works.
With the recent changes to the 2.6 kernel it 'should' be possible to get the same output, it may need some poking at how the new psmouse module interprets things though.
With the raw output, can it be interpreted as co-ordinates? And on the initial touch of the touchscreen and the touchpad, does it put out something that isn't a co-ordinate ie. something to say you have switched from using the pad to the screen and visa versa?
Thanks,
Stan
Copy "lbtouch_drv.o" to "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input".
James
Two things. I felt it was only right to acknowledge this guy for the work that he did. My touchscreen works because of his efforts that I was able to benefit from.
He also has some information and patch software for the 2.6 kernel. I mention this because it might be a clue that someone can use to patchup the 2.6 kernel. I was unable to get it to apply to my Suse installations. I would dearly love to - HINT HINT.
PS. If you don't speak German don't worry. The parts your interested in are in English.
Just got info back from a cf-28, product name CF-28S3QGBDM, product CF28-3.
Not too sure how the parser works for the DMI, it should accept wildcards though.
Stan
Stan,
Would you please confirm the model number? 3's in the full model number at CF-28_3_____ indicate a NON-Touch Screen.
IE: Pentium III 1GHz, 13.3" NON touch screen, 30GB, 256 MB RAM, 56K/LAN, FDD, Mobitex with Multiband antenna Win 2000
Not sure if it will be as useful for info as a touchscreen model, but maybe I missed something in a previous post. Been doing too many 20-24 hour days lately. :-)
Here is the DMI info from the Panasonic DMI Utility for our CF-28s which are definitely touchscreen models:
[System Information]
Manufacturer = Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,Ltd.
Product Name = CF-28STJGZKM
Version = 003
Wake-up Type = Unknown
Serial Number =
[Base Board Information]
Manufacturer = Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,Ltd.
Product = CF28-3
Version = 001
Now that we know the 2.4 kernel works and that the Lifebook driver works in that case, I imagine one of the steps in getting it working on a 2.6 kernel will be a matter of getting the lifebook.c setup with the right DMI name (I believe it will be the Product Name rather than the just the Product which is displayed above but I don't know for sure) for either a CF-28 or CF-29 and recompiled into the 2.6 kernel. You may have to get some type of DMI viewer utility (there are ones for WIN XP on the panasonic.ca support site or some Linux distros may have dmidecode built in) and run it on your specific Toughbook since there are many different CF-28 Product Names. Instead of renaming the model with a different CF-XX name, a new suffix seems to be added to CF-28XXXXXXX name whenever things like a faster CPU or other changes are put into the base model design. This may be one reason why this is especially difficult on the Toughbooks - if it is indeed the Product Name that the lifebook.c needs, even people with CF-28s could have to use a variety of different names to get it to work on their specific CF-28.
This may be one reason why this is especially difficult on the Toughbooks - if it is indeed the Product Name that the lifebook.c needs, even people with CF-28s could have to use a variety of different names to get it to work on their specific CF-28.
I have model numbers to 277 different CF-28's alone. All of them are touchscreens but about 45. I have no way of knowing if this is the COMPLETE list.
This might not be the best approach. Might be better to change how the driver behaves or what it checks, I don't know, not my area.
Maybe check radiation levels inside. If they are low, it must be a ToughBook's metal case accounting for it, initialize touchscreen. :-)
James
Last edited by james_jenkins; 02-22-2007 at 01:31 AM.
This week I received a CF-28 that I purchased on eBay. My 11-month old son dumped a bottle of Diet Coke on my wife's last laptop... I decided it was time to go rugged. Can never be too careful with toddlers around! As this is primarily going to be my wife's Firefox/Abiword/Gaim machine, I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (kernel version is 2.6.17).
Absolutely everything worked out of the box, including sound, video, touchpad... even the generic Mandarin-labeled PCMCIA WiFi card ($5 shipped on ebay?) that has given me so much trouble in the past worked perfectly upon entering my WEP key. Obviously, the only thing that DIDN'T work out of the box was the touchscreen. (Yes, I'm sure it has one... before I wiped, I was able to drag the WinXP login box around with my finger.)
I will be following this thread with great interest... if there's anything I can do to help, I'd be happy to. While I'm not (yet) an experienced Linux hacker, I am a programmer by trade and am slowly trying to free myself from M$... so whatever I need to learn to be of help to you, I'm ready and willing to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty.
Distribution: debian with bits of everything stuck on it
Posts: 114
Rep:
The cf-28 I was given the DMI info from is definitely a touchscreen model, it should be all standard but some of these things live strange lives of being pulled apart and re-built so cant be sure.
Re-compiling the lifebook module without the DMI checks would get a starting point to find out how well the module works, it might not be exactly 'stable' though . Didn't find much out about using wildcards with the DMI check, any part of the DMI info can be used so it should be simple enough to use the 'Product' entry instead.
The offer of programing skills is great, welcome to the world of open source BTW. Glad to hear Ubuntu did the job for you, the days of driver problems with linux seem to be almost over
I cant call myself a programmer, (although with the reports of an average of 3 lines of code per day within microsoft maybe I can ) but I can probably give an idea on some of the tools worth using.
For debian (or Ubuntu) the 'kernel-package' tool makes life much easier, the trickiest part is getting all the usefull dependencies installed as the package does not directly depend or recommend them. A quick search for 'kernel-package' will give a few good guides, most of them with a list of other recommended packages.
Ill be getting a cf-28 next month now I know it can be made to work. Thanks.
Cheers,
Stan
The cf-28 I was given the DMI info from is definitely a touchscreen model, it should be all standard but some of these things live strange lives of being pulled apart and re-built so cant be sure.
Stan,
Thanks for confirming. This kind of makes one of my points about how to initialize the driver. While you say it is a touchscreen now, and I believe you, it wasn't a touchscreen when it left it's maker. It was a NON-touchscreen. I come across these alot. Someone probably swapped a touchscreen in it. I've thought about doing it a million times with 1ghz units because their cheaper to come by without the touchscreen. IE: CF-28S3_____ . I retro-fit ThinkPads daily with stuff, so to me this would be something "normal".
But lets suppose that we put all the model numbers that came with touchscreens in our driver. Your model number CF-28S3QGBDM, won't be there because it wasn't a touchscreen to begin with. Actually, we only need to check the fourth character after the CF-. If it is a 3, 4, or a 5, it is a NON-touchscreen. Anything thing else, IE: Letter "B" - "W", it is a touchscreen. This should prove much simpler than putting hundreds of model numbers in the driver, but even still, your's would get stopped at the 3, and the driver doesn't load. Now of course you could change the driver to only check for a "4" or a "5", and recomplile the driver, but what we want is something that actually can tell if a touchscreen is truely present at "this" time or not, and do it quickly.
Much thought needs to be put into this, and has been. There was alot of talk about it 12-18 months ago in the kernel mailing list by some pretty clever guys, but today all there is for me to use is my little hack job. What baffles me is that after all these years, there is still not an official-whiz-bang solution for this. Seems Toughbooks and Linux would have been a perfect combination to me, like ThinkPads. Mine seem better suited to Linux that to Windows itself.
Let me close with this. If you want an interesting read about how hardware checking can be used, google: IBM ThinkPad Wireless Mini-pci error 1802. See what you think...
James
Last edited by james_jenkins; 02-24-2007 at 09:36 PM.
I've been watching this thread and it's pretty interesting to notice peoples are getting their touchscreens working. In our organization we have several different Toughbook models (CF-18,CF-29,CF-Y5 and CF-19 etc).
I recently found that when I tried (k)ubuntu 6.10 with my CF-18 it has been working ok. After recent kernel upgrade (to 2.6.17) my touchscreen and touchpad got messed up.
This new kernel includes FujitsuSiemens touchscreen driver and it also affects to touchpad. So basicly touch screen is working (even it's not calibrated correctly) but touchpad went crazy also. So basicly what I am asking, does anybody else face this situation and how to get rid of that touch screen (I can live without touch, but not without touchpad) ?
I have tried disabling touchscreen from bios, with no luck. I recently found out (on kernel mailing list) that there is kind of multiplexing hardware in these machines to handle touchscreen & pad.
This problem is not an issue with my CF-29 (running that same kubuntu 6.10 with kernel upgraded to 2.6.17).
Distribution: debian with bits of everything stuck on it
Posts: 114
Rep:
They are both connected through the same interface, it should be /dev/psaux as far as I know. Trouble is, there will be a short sequence, a few bytes to tell the driver you have switched from the screen to the pad. If you could post it, it would be a big help. Go to a terminal and run "sudo od /dev/psaux", then when you touch the pad and the screen there should be lines of figures scrolling in the terminal. If not it is a different node, you can find out which in /etc X11/xorg.conf . Can you switch between the pad and the screen a few times and post the output here? If you could do that for both the 18 and the 29 it would be a big help.
If you just want to get rid of it, try "sudo rmmod lifebook", that should unload the touchscreen driver. If the pad stops working too, try "sudo modprobe psmouse"
Cheers,
Stan
They are both connected through the same interface, it should be /dev/psaux as far as I know. Trouble is, there will be a short sequence, a few bytes to tell the driver you have switched from the screen to the pad. If you could post it, it would be a big help. Go to a terminal and run "sudo od /dev/psaux", then when you touch the pad and the screen there should be lines of figures scrolling in the terminal. If not it is a different node, you can find out which in /etc X11/xorg.conf . Can you switch between the pad and the screen a few times and post the output here? If you could do that for both the 18 and the 29 it would be a big help.
If you just want to get rid of it, try "sudo rmmod lifebook", that should unload the touchscreen driver. If the pad stops working too, try "sudo modprobe psmouse"
Cheers,
Stan
Here it goes (CF-18DHAFBGS):
Touchpad is 0-260
Touchscreen is 266-606
Touchpad is 606-760
If you just want to get rid of it, try "sudo rmmod lifebook", that should unload the touchscreen driver. If the pad stops working too, try "sudo modprobe psmouse"
I could not find lifebook module from loaded modules, there is no psmouse either.*
dmesg:
--
[17179573.952000] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input0
[17179591.624000] input: PC Speaker as /class/input/input1
[17179593.340000] input: LBPS/2 Fujitsu Lifebook TouchScreen as /class/input/input2
[17179593.552000] input: Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse as /class/input/input3
[17179593.552000] input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-1
[17179593.552000] drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.6:USB HID core driver
[17179593.760000] input: LBPS/2 Fujitsu Lifebook TouchScreen as /class/input/input4
[17203162.612000] input: Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse as /class/input/input5
[17203162.612000] input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-1
--
I think problem is this LBPS/2 in this kubuntu 6.10 (Linux cf18 2.6.17-11-generic #2 SMP Thu Feb 1 19:52:28 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux).
Somehow touchpad and touchscreen are working together at the same time in ways that touchpad is not usable at all. It acts like a touch screen, eg. has absolute points where I can touch arrow to be.
Looking forward to any ideas and remember, this occurred just after kubuntu kernel upgrade to 2.6.17-11. Before that, everything was ok.
About CF-29 there is no such problem. Running same kernel version with kubuntu, touchpad is working ok. Touch screen is not working on CF-29 at all (and I have not tried to make it work). I'll test debug print on CF-29 and another CF-18, if there is something wrong with this CF-18.
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Cf-28
Can never be too careful with toddlers around! As this is primarily going to be my wife's Firefox/Abiword/Gaim machine, I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (kernel version is 2.6.17).
