Dell Duo Setup Guide

[ninjaaron]

We were talking about meego a while back. There are fixes now to activate the touchscreen, for anyone interested. It's the same fix we're using, but with a different bootloader.

This thread explains how to get it working on a system that uses meego's bootloader.

If you want to boot it using Ubuntu's GRUB, you need to create a custom menu entry with the usbhid.quirks thing in that entry, which is explained here. The Meego UI is, overall, an excellent fit for the duo. There is still difficulty for me getting the virtual keyboard to work. There is an excellent virtual keyboard in the repos for the meego handhelds, but I haven't managed to pull it in (may be because I'm using netbook version 1.2, and the handset version is still on 1.1 and has a different kernel).

[ninjaaron]

Touchscreen is working in 11.10

Still no multitouch

[Kirboosy]

Touchscreen is working in 11.10

Still no multitouch

Lack of multi touch makes me sad. :'( Only weakness of running Ubuntu on my Duo.

[ninjaaron]

Lack of multi touch makes me sad. :'( Only weakness of running Ubuntu on my Duo.

Well, I found something that ought to make you happy today (no, not multitouch, sorry).

Found a package in universe called easystroke (yes, someone actually thought that was a good name for a program). It links user-defined gestures with user-defined actions... can be shell commands (including scripts), key combinations, and various other actions.

IT IS WONDERFUL!!

So far, I've got gestures for closing, minimising, and fullscreening windows, activating compiz's new "love handles," showing all windows (the Super+w thing), calling the keyboard, clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations, and scrolling.

It really is wonderful. This is the ideal solution for single-touch tablet PC. I finally feel like my custom UI is done. It's a good feeling.

[U875]

Good morning to all,

Firstly, thanks for the effort to educate the people how they can configure the Duo to make it usable with ubuntu and the touch screen.
I followed the article too at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1658635, but instead of using the new unity desktop I preferred to keep the "computer mode" of the duo active and just mak more user friendly interface for the touch screen (i.e. to marry the computer philosophy with a lot of capabilities with the nice human-machine interface that one sees on ipads....). That briefly means that I made extensive use of the awn bar on the left, a lot of programmes as icons defined on workspace (both of them for the typical usage of the laptop/tablet), increased size of task bars and menus (so fingures capture them easier), simple defined applets (so when the laptop rotates they are not too close), and even a "kill" button if anythings hangs...etc.

A few items though did not work as hoped and I was wondering if any one out there has found any configuration trick that he could share for the following:

1) I prefer desktop wall and rotating cube enabled but although with the mouse (in a computer mode) a window is sliding to the next workspace when pushed to the edge, using the touch screen this does not happen . That is, a finger pushing a window to the edge does not result to a rotating cube change. So, how can someone make the cube rotate when a window is being carried across from one worskpace to another?

2) One of the basic things we use with a mouse is a "right click" to create folders, check properties etc. Is there any way to have a "right-click" capability with the touch screen? (without using the on-screen keyboard)

3) When using the touch screen, scrolling requires the fingure to accurately grab the scroll bar to pull a doc down - for all document types. This make its use difficult. It would be more appropriate to have the cursor scrolling down a doc as long as the document is not editable and have an "edi mode button" somewhere defined if some text needed to be marked or edited. The ipad's philosophy popping up the on-board keyboard when in "editing mode" is a good idea. All we have is to figure out how to do it....
In addition, the size of the keyboard is not appropriate at the moment. If and when the gyroscopic sensor use gets sorted I feel it would be useful to have the onboard keyboard invoked with a size adjusted to the size of the screen.

4) The 2-finger zoom does not work for me either. Couldn't get it working at the moment.

If any one of the community has some more tipe to play with these features and get some results, I would kindly ask to drop us anote in the forum. It would help a great deal.

Best regards

Alex

[raphaelsaldanha]

Hi Alex,

About the right click, you just need touch and maintain the touch for about 3 or 4 seconds, and the menu appears.

Can you share you us, with more details, all the improvements you have made?

Raphael

[ninjaaron]

Hi Alex,

About the right click, you just need touch and maintain the touch for about 3 or 4 seconds, and the menu appears.

Can you share you us, with more details, all the improvements you have made?

Raphael

You have to enable it first in the mouse>accessibility dialogue, and it's glitchy in 11.04. You can create a gesture for it in easytouch, however.

As for getting the screen to flip... hmmm... let me check...
***

nope... according to configuration editor (gconf), there is supposed to be an option that allows you to change where the screen edge begins and end in the future, but it's not implemented yet... let me verify that on google...
***
nope, doesn't look like it.

http://forum.compiz.org/viewtopic.php?t=6885.

[Cammaaron]

I am curious.

As anyone looked in why the touchscreen multi-touch does not work?
Isn't there a way to comparing what data is being sent from the touchscreen between linux and windows and seeing how it being sent through the kernel for its touchscreen support.

[w1ll1am]

Well, I found something that ought to make you happy today (no, not multitouch, sorry).

Found a package in universe called easystroke (yes, someone actually thought that was a good name for a program). It links user-defined gestures with user-defined actions... can be shell commands (including scripts), key combinations, and various other actions.

IT IS WONDERFUL!!

So far, I've got gestures for closing, minimising, and fullscreening windows, activating compiz's new "love handles," showing all windows (the Super+w thing), calling the keyboard, clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations, and scrolling.

It really is wonderful. This is the ideal solution for single-touch tablet PC. I finally feel like my custom UI is done. It's a good feeling.

this makes me want to use my duo again. i have not used it in so long because without multitouch its almost pointless. thanks for finding it. great job

[ninjaaron]

I am curious.

As anyone looked in why the touchscreen multi-touch does not work?
Isn't there a way to comparing what data is being sent from the touchscreen between linux and windows and seeing how it being sent through the kernel for its touchscreen support.

I looked at some of that stuff in the beginning. I can't remember the exactly what the program is, but it's something about an xinput prober. It seems like it was registering multiple input ports from the screen, but it was like 3 or 4 of them, and I think we somehow decided that the presence of all those extra inputs was confusing X, since none of them do anything except the one... I don't remember exactly, but I know the X server was expecting multiple inputs for this device, but it wouldn't read them for some reason.

That makes me wonder if an input stack based on GEM or something would read the inputs correctly. I hear stack through which X processes multitouch input is incredibly convoluted (I actually watched a really nice video lecture by one of the head guys at xorg talking about how much X sucks and he can't wait for new frameworks to supersede it).

edit: found the weird thing I was talking about.
if you run xinput list, you get this in the pointer section:

⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ eGalax Inc. USB TouchController         	id=10	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ eGalax Inc. USB TouchController         	id=11	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ eGalax Inc. USB TouchController         	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad              	id=15	[slave  pointer  (2)]

I don't know if it should be reading one or two from the screen, but three is too many. Something fishy about it.

It got me working on the multitouch again. No success, but I did somehow manage to enable pinch zooming on the touchpad in the process. You can get it if you add the utouch team repository and update. This does some weird things to the scrolling however, so I'm not going to post instructions. Google is at the disposal of those who would like to try it.