Touchscreen whose drivers play nice with Linux

**l Aedis l** · 06-29-2006, 07:26 PM

Anyone have any sugestion on which touchscreen monitors and drivers for them work well with linux? (specifically Vector Linux....btw is a very small and fast distro.....www.vectorlinux.com)

Anyways...my friend has just purchased a Pyle touchscreen monitor, and it has been a nightmare getting the drivers working. Has anyone had ALOT of experience with getting drivers to work in linux? I mean, they are linux drivers, but only for the wrong kernel version...so we just need to adapt them somehow.

So let me know if you have found any monitor that comes with a variety of touchscreen linux drivers...i am personally considering a lilliput, not sure what they have to offer.

Let me know.

**Change** · 07-04-2006, 01:14 PM

The eGalax touchscreen drivers are pretty easy to install, see here: http://tzilla.is-a-geek.com/articles/egalax/

**DarquePervert** · 07-04-2006, 04:21 PM

That pyle touchscreen isn't designed to work with a PC, so you're going to have problems with connecting it to any computer with any OS. That unit was designed to control a Pyle DVD player or similar car audio gear.

The egalax drivers noted above will work with just about any of the commonly available touchscreens on the market (Lilliput, Dynamix, Xenarc, Super, Avatar, etc.).

**rocken** · 07-11-2006, 04:34 PM

Well Fedora Core 5 now works with the Xenarc TSV 700 series.

They updated their website with newer installer for FC5.

**oeri** · 07-12-2006, 06:43 AM

I've been using the Xenarc 700IDT In-Dash touchscreen with Linux for some time now.

**fossks** · 07-26-2006, 11:59 AM

I have another suggestion. I personally could not get the eGalax drivers to work when installed according to the README and any howto on the web. However, I did follow one howto and used the EVTOUCH drivers. You can find these at multiple locations if you google for them.

I was able to follow the instructions, have the xorg.conf file modified to use the EVTOUCH driver, calibrated and it works great. What I am not clear on is that it stills need to have the "usbtouchscreen" module loaded which is aliased with touchkitusb, which from my knowledge is the eGalax driver. I needed to have the eGalax driver compiled with the Kernel, though.

**ruzzmon** · 07-26-2006, 11:08 PM

Originally Posted by fossks

I have another suggestion. I personally could not get the eGalax drivers to work when installed according to the README and any howto on the web. However, I did follow one howto and used the EVTOUCH drivers. You can find these at multiple locations if you google for them.

I was able to follow the instructions, have the xorg.conf file modified to use the EVTOUCH driver, calibrated and it works great. What I am not clear on is that it stills need to have the "usbtouchscreen" module loaded which is aliased with touchkitusb, which from my knowledge is the eGalax driver. I needed to have the eGalax driver compiled with the Kernel, though.

I believe if you are using Xorg, you need two drivers. The first converts the touchscreen output into raw data as a device, and the second reads the device into Xorg. I could be wrong, since I don't use Xorg (I only need the kernel module). Check out http://linux.chapter7.ch/touchkit/mini-howto.txt. Not sure if you've seen that howto, but it explains in more detail. Its also written by the author of the kernel module, I think.

**tripzero** · 10-02-2006, 11:54 PM

Hmmm... I know i must be doing something wrong here. I plug in my touchscreen and the X and Y axis are swapped. I tried to add the correct line "options touchkitusb swap_xy=1" to the /etc/modprobe.conf (which modprobe.conf didn't exist on my ubuntu system therefore had to be created), but it doesn't make a difference. You guys I've found are the pioneers in this field, any suggestions?

Thanks

**ruzzmon** · 10-03-2006, 12:43 PM

Originally Posted by kev000

Hmmm... I know i must be doing something wrong here. I plug in my touchscreen and the X and Y axis are swapped. I tried to add the correct line "options touchkitusb swap_xy=1" to the /etc/modprobe.conf (which modprobe.conf didn't exist on my ubuntu system therefore had to be created), but it doesn't make a difference. You guys I've found are the pioneers in this field, any suggestions?

Thanks

A quick Google search makes me think that Ubuntu doesn't treat module options the same way as other distributions. I'd suggest looking up how to add module parameters correctly for Ubuntu specifically. Does 'modules-update' or 'update-modules' exist on your machine?

To test to see if the swapping does work, I'd suggest removing the module and then restarting it, but with the swap command. Check out modprobe and insmod man pages if you're not sure how to do that. If it works with insmod, then you know you just have to configure your Ubuntu system to load the correct module options.

**tripzero** · 10-04-2006, 05:59 AM

I finally figured out how to swap the XY. This will be good refernce for any other ubuntu/debian users down the road: instead of writing to /etc/modprobe.conf you need to create a file named after the module in /etc/modprobe.d/ . In my case ubuntu called the touchscreen, "usbtouchscreen" so I made a file called "usbtouchscreen.modprobe" and put the option in there to swap the XY. It worked.

Now my problem lies in that no matter what I change my xorg.conf values to be, the inacuracy of the mouse doesn't change. Here is what it looks like:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "usbtouchscreen"
Driver "evtouch"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3"
Option "DeviceName" "usbtouchscreen"
Option "MinX" "62"
Option "MinY" "1910"
Option "MaxX" "1966"
Option "MaxY" "45"
Option "ReportingMode" "Raw"
Option "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection
Again changing the min and max values appears not to effect in any way. Any suggestions?