HOW TO: Set up the HP TX2z and Dell XT & XT2 (N-trig digitizer) in Ubuntu

[brock029]

Hello every one new to the forum but have been using ubuntu on and off for years. I recently bought a latitude xt and installed Ubuntu 12.04. The touch screen works except using your finger it starts the mouse on the left side of the screen and quickly moves it to where your finger is. The pen works just fine though.

I really dont know where to start to get it working, I have read the op but it really just left me confused, any help would be appreciated.

[Favux]

Hi brock029,

Welcome to Ubuntu forums!

The touch screen works except using your finger it starts the mouse on the left side of the screen and quickly moves it to where your finger is.

So do you have working single finger touch?

I have read the op but it really just left me confused, any help would be appreciated.

I can see where it would be coming to it fresh. The first thing is to determine which version of the N-Trig firmware you have installed. Hopefully you still have a Windows install on the XT. See under "Ubuntu Release Specific Notes" and "Miscellaneous Notes". Also the output of the command:

xinput list

entered in terminal should give you an idea of where things stand.

[brock029]

Hi brock029,

Welcome to Ubuntu forums!


So do you have working single finger touch?

I can see where it would be coming to it fresh. The first thing is to determine which version of the N-Trig firmware you have installed. Hopefully you still have a Windows install on the XT. See under "Ubuntu Release Specific Notes" and "Miscellaneous Notes". Also the output of the command:

xinput list

entered in terminal should give you an idea of where things stand.

Thanks for the quick reply, I actually am currently running off of an external hard drive. Right now BIOS does not detect the internal drive, I have ordered another cable and hope that fixes it.

Also the touch screen seems to intermittently work. Right now single touch is running fine, about thirty minutes ago it was click the left side of the screen and dragging to my finger.

My xinput list results

Virtual Core Pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]

• Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Pen stylus id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Touchscreen id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-trig Pen stylus id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Touchscreen id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
• PS/2 Generic Mouse id=14 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Pen eraser id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Pen pad id=17 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Pen eraser id=18 [slave pointer (2)]
• N-Trig Pen pad id=19 [slave pointer (2)]

Virtual Core Keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]

• Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
• Video Bus id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
• Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
• Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
• AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
• Dell WMI hotkeys id=15 [slave keyboard (3)]

Also to add a little to see if there are any suggestions. I am actually going to use this to mount underneath a kitchen cabinet. My plan is going to need to have the screen and touch input flipped 180 degrees. That way it is a permanent online recipe finder/music player.

[Favux]

Alright, it appears to be an older N-Trig firmware as you do not have "N-Trig Multitouch" in your xinput list output. Plus event nodes are being duplicated. Would you be able to do what you want with single finger touch? In other words do you need gestures?

Right now single touch is running fine, about thirty minutes ago it was click the left side of the screen and dragging to my finger.

Still not sure what you are telling me. Are you saying it is confined to only part of the screen?

If so you may just need to specify the coordinates for evdev. Stylus/pen is on the Wacom driver and touch should be on evdev. To confirm run in a terminal:

xinput list-props 10

xinput list-props 12

[brock029]

Alright, it appears to be an older N-Trig firmware as you do not have "N-Trig Multitouch" in your xinput list output. Plus event nodes are being duplicated. Would you be able to do what you want with single finger touch? In other words do you need gestures?

Still not sure what you are telling me. Are you saying it is confined to only part of the screen?

If so you may just need to specify the coordinates for evdev. Stylus/pen is on the Wacom driver and touch should be on evdev. To confirm run in a terminal:

xinput list-props 10

xinput list-props 12

Sorry, randomly when I place my finger any where on the screen it starts the mouse in the same vertical position as my finger but the cursor starts all the way left then slides to the position of my finger. If that makes any more sense. Single touch should work since firefox has touch scroll plugins.

[rafiyr]

Also to add a little to see if there are any suggestions. I am actually going to use this to mount underneath a kitchen cabinet. My plan is going to need to have the screen and touch input flipped 180 degrees. That way it is a permanent online recipe finder/music player.

The xinput list looks a bit suspicious. Would you please check on the kernel messages when the ntrig module loads (dmesg | grep -i trig).



Sounds like a nice plan. Might be a good idea to set some low power settings to keep it cool when mounted like that (you'll have to let us know).

I've had a couple without hard drives and have used 3 alternatives: cf card + zif pata adapter, net boot, and usb. The CF card is definitely the nicest (much nicer than the original hard drives).

For usb, there are some microSD usb adapters that shove the card into the usb port with only a tiny bit that extends beyond the port (elago is one brand that sells these). One of those plus a class 10 8-16GB card should work well for your use (assuming the media files are stored elsewhere).

[brock029]

The xinput list looks a bit suspicious. Would you please check on the kernel messages when the ntrig module loads (dmesg | grep -i trig).



Sounds like a nice plan. Might be a good idea to set some low power settings to keep it cool when mounted like that (you'll have to let us know).

I've had a couple without hard drives and have used 3 alternatives: cf card + zif pata adapter, net boot, and usb. The CF card is definitely the nicest (much nicer than the original hard drives).

For usb, there are some microSD usb adapters that shove the card into the usb port with only a tiny bit that extends beyond the port (elago is one brand that sells these). One of those plus a class 10 8-16GB card should work well for your use (assuming the media files are stored elsewhere).

Sorry it took me a little while to get back to you. Here are the results.


[ 12.516786] ntrig 0003:1B96:0001.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Device [HID 1b96:0001] on usb-0000:00:13.1-2/input0
[ 17.528218] ntrig 0003:1B96:0001.0002: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Device [HID 1b96:0001] on usb-0000:00:13.1-2/input1

Actually right now I have it running off of a 4gb flash drive. Its running great so far, all I need is a web browser and everything will be streamed from the internet or my media server.

EDIT: I got the display rotation to work with the ubuntu display properties, then i used Something like this to get the input display to rotate also.

[Favux]

FYI
I just got a Wacom tablet that has 16 FGT. Going to try to set up touch on evdev to investigate what's going on multitouch wise in Precise in later.

Going throught the Ubuntu multitouch wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch/
Diagnostics have shown it has 4FGT and better available so things look good so far.

Just found this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch/TouchpadSupport which sure looks like it might explain what's been going on with the switch from ginn to geis.

We've made a ton of changes in how X works in Ubuntu starting in 12.04 LTS. One big change was a move of the gesture stack to the client side of the X server instead of being embedded as huge patches in the server itself. This means the gesture stack relies on XInput touch events.

Unfortunately, X can't send touch events if it is also sending other events caused by the same touches. For example, if you have two finger scrolling enabled for a touchpad, X can't send touch events until you put three touches down.

It appears 3FG gestures should work out of the box but 2FG gestures need special setup. This is the first documentation I've seen explaining this change. I assume this happened because Peter Hutterer added all the multitouch code to the X Server: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2011/12/mu...es-posted.html He describes how to use it in a series of blog posts: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2011/12/mu...ng-events.html

Haven't looked into it yet but bring it up in case someone already has figured it out and wants to share or wants to look into it too.

Unity Gesture UI Guidelines: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...tzoD3tFc/edit#

[wildschweini]

Install libusb-dev and try again.

Thank you for the reply. libusb-dev is (unfortunately) already installed. The script is not working.

Any other idea?

I ran the script calib.sh as sudo. It worked fine for kubuntu 11.04 but seems not to work for 11.10. Might the OS the crucial point?

[Favux]

FYI Update


I may have a handle on the multitouch not working mystery. When I run ginn, which is installed in Precise by default, I see this error:

bunch of stuff
.......
   wish
    action
     trigger
     key
Button : 4 Button : 5 
error subscribing to gestures

Apparently ginn has been broken since early in Precise Beta 1 (reported 4-18-12) and is still broken in Quantal. Action on the bug finally occurred 11-15-12 and Importance was changed to high. No fix in sight. See launchpad bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...nn/+bug/985121

Since multitouch code was added to X Server 1.12 I'm wondering if the problem isn't the hybrid 1.11/1.12 X Server Precise uses and its mutant ABI. But that doesn't explain Quantal which has X Server 1.13.

But I would think you should still see the Unity supported 3 and 4 finger system gestures: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch/ I do have those with my third generation BambooPT in both Precise and Oneiric. Actually that brings up an issue someone might help me with. In Oneiric were you able to use ginn alongside Unity? I'm sort of under the impression that Unity consumes all the 3 and 4 finger touches for its gestures. And the only way to use ginn for custom 3 and 4 finger gestures is to disable Unity's gesture use and re-compile it. It appears this wasn't an issue in Natty. Anyway this is what I see when I disable Gesture in xf86-input-wacom-0.18.0 or higher so that two or more touch contacts are passed up to the X Server:

1 finger tap > left click (by xf86-input-wacom)
2 fingers disabled
Unity System Gestures
3 finger press and drag > move window
(3 finger tap shows grab handles in Quantal)
4 finger swipe left/right > reveal/hide launcher (if the dock autohide is enabled)
4 finger tap > open or close dash

So I need ginn to add 2FGT gestures such as right click and horizontal and vertical scroll. It appears N-Trigs are also getting 1 finger left click through xf86-input-evdev.

Not able to get ginn working in Oneiric even with xf86-input-wacom-0.18.0 yet. May be a Wacom specific issue, perhaps with how input-wacom is sending touch events from the kernel with its wacom.ko? With touch on the Synaptics driver I am able to see touch events on ginn in the terminal.

The alternative to ginn would seem to be touchegg. But I believe I have seen that is broken for Precise also! At least the version in the repository doesn't work. I may have read compiling a later version will work. I'll try to find that again. Touchegg would be interesting especially if the new gesture configuration gui for it actually works and works in Precise. Might be nicer than working with wishes.xml.

Precise - Touchégg downloads available at the touchegg site along with a wiki with instructions. "OS X-like multitouch gestures for Macbook Pro running Ubuntu 12.10" appears to be a good tutorial. The instructions on the site to compile touchegg did not work for me. I used sudo apt-get build-dep touchegg which installed libgeis-dev libqt4-dev libqt4-qt3support qt4-linguist-tools qt4-qmake. Got an error on make which required installing libutouch-geis-dev. I was then able to compile and install it. I noticed build-dep did not overlap much with the instructions alternate sudo apt-get install build-essential libqt4-dev utouch libx11-6 libxtst-dev. The touchegg-1.1 CHANGELOG says:

[+] Touchégg v1.1 (2012/07/22)
- Added Ubuntu Precise compatibility

So to compile touchegg in Precise the following should work. Download Touchégg v1.1 onto your Desktop and extract it. Then:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libqt4-dev utouch libx11-6 libxtst-dev libgeis-dev libqt4-qt3support qt4-linguist-tools qt4-qmake libutouch-geis-dev
cd Desktop/touchegg-1.1
qmake
make
sudo make install

Instead of ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf the touchegg.conf seems to be at /usr/share/touchegg. However the gui Touchegg-gce expects the .conf file at ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf. Don't know about Touchégg itself. I used the gui to create the folder touchegg and the file touchegg.conf and then copied the contents of /usr/share/touchegg/touchegg.conf over to ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf. To install the gui on Precise I did the following.

cd Desktop
git clone https://github.com/Raffarti/Touchegg-gce.git
cd Touchegg-gce
qmake
make

Didn't need any new dependencies beyond what were already installed for Touchégg. There is no install so run the touchegg-gce binary in the Touchegg-gce folder. Can use a launcher if you want to use the gui. The gui is basically an editor for the .conf file. Haven't tested anything yet. I think I'll try Precise Kubuntu.

By design Unity does not allow disabling its system gestures which you would need to do to use custom gestures. See "Unity Gesture UI Guidelines". On askubuntu "How can I disable arbitrary default multitouch gestures in Unity?" is a good discussion of what's needed. The gesture code has to be disabled and then Unity re-compiled.


I'll update this post with any more findings as long as I can edit it.