[Nottingham] Touchscreen under X

[Michael Quaintance]

James Dobson wrote:

>A wild stab in the dark is 
>
>http://www.3m.com/3MTouchSystems/downloads/Linux_drivers.jhtml
>
>you may want to try and see if anything appears in
>'dmesg' as this may help in find out what the device
>is, in anything driver related it *really* does help
>to know what/who made the device.
>
>James D
>  
>

Thanks for the reply. I have come across these drivers before but have 
not attempted to use them as  they seem to be yet another example of a 
company not understanding Linux. By that I mean they are built against a 
handful of specific Red Hat targets, none of which are my setup or even 
seem to be compatible with what I have.

Due to a lack of expansion options for this POS terminal, it is not 
possible to connect cd/floppy to it to initiate an installation. The 
hard disk it came with is a 2.5" laptop model and is noisy as hell. It 
has Win98 on it and I don't wish to trash this in case I end up with a 
completely unusable doorstop. I don't want to spend money buying a new 
drive for this due to budgetary cutbacks.

As for the dmesg. Well, the stripped-down environment provided by LTSP 
doesn't have such luxuries as 'dmesg'. Almost all the standard utilities 
it does have come from busybox to minimise the NFS traffic. However, I 
can scroll through the dmesg output as it appears on screen before 
attempting to startx and the only mention of anything like the 
touchscreen is the reference...

mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

There is nothing else even remotely relevant in the output.

As I mentioned in the original email, I know the controller is 
Microtouch from the Win98. If I could find any tools to interrogate it 
further under Win98 I would be able to get more info about it but 
alas... I mentioned the Elographics in the original mail just to show I 
had tried that and the result was the same.

Thankyou again for your suggestion and I may have to resort to ebaying 
for a cheap laptop drive to try a PXE install of one of the 3M-supported 
distributions. This is another of the reasons I abhor binary-only drivers.

Anyone able to offer any other suggestions? Please?!?!

-Penfold