Saturday 1 November 2014

Hardware support news

Trackballs

I dusted off (literally) my Logitech Marble trackball to replace the Intuos tablet + mouse combination that I was using to cut down on the lateral movement of my right arm which led to back pains.

Not that you care about that one bit, but that meant that I needed a way to get a scroll wheel working with this scroll-wheel less trackball. That's now implemented in gnome-settings-daemon for GNOME 3.16. You'd run:


gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.trackball scroll-wheel-emulation-button 8

With "8" being the mouse button number to use to make the trackball ball into a wheel. We plan to add an interface to configure this in the Settings.

Touchscreens

Touchscreens are now switched off when the screensaver is on. This means you'll usually need to use one of the hardware buttons on tablets, or a mouse or keyboard on laptops to turn the screen back on.

Note that you'll need a kernel patch to avoid surprises when the touchscreen is re-enabled.

More touchscreens

The driver for the Goodix touchscreen found in the Onda v975w is now upstream as well.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

I have been using a marble mouse for about as long as I can remember (10/15 years?) and have the following configuration under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Marble Mouse"
MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball"
MatchIsPointer "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9"
Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

This makes the far left button the normal left click, clicking left small button is like clicking the scrollwheel and opening links in new tabs etc, holding this small button enables scrolling using the ball.
The small right button is still 'next' because I don't have a use for it.

Dag said...

This is great news for me! I too use a trackball, and while it does have a scroll wheel it's a bit inconveniently positioned and only one-dimensional. Does scroll wheel emulation enable two-dimensional scrolling, ie. horizontal and vertical, at the same time?

Unknown said...

For me it scrolls both horizontally and vertically.

Unknown said...

The Goodix driver seems to work ~well on the (US) Microcenter TW100 tablet (very close spec match for the onda) save for being inverted and swapped left to right.

Is there any possibility we could get swapx/swapy options added to the module?

Unknown said...

BTW, thanks for the goodix driver!

Bastien Nocera said...

Unknown: You'll need to either file a bug against the goodix driver on github or send a mail to the linux-input list.

Unknown said...

Hello, you can open issue section at https://github.com/hadess/gt9xx? I have troubles with touchscreen at my tablet (Teclast X2 Pro, Arch Linux, Gnome). It doesn't work after suspend.

Bastien Nocera said...

sdsf dsfdsfdsf: No, use the linux-input mailing-list, or report a bug against your distribution's kernel. The code there is only for testing purposes.