Finally got the touchscreen working on the laptop. It worked fine on the desktop, though I think the pcmcia card I’m using in the laptop was giving me problems.
Not sure what got it working in the end (couldn’t get an xorg.conf file to work at all… kept crashing on boot) but among the things I did that may have got it working was install the default microtouch drivers :
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mutouch
and set the serial port as the input with
sudo inputattach -mtouch /dev/ttyS4
ttyS4 will vary depending on your port. I found mine by unplugging the pcmcia card then replugging it and entering dmesg in the terminal which showed the port number it was assigned among other things.
Didn’t work the first few times, then it just suddenly started working, so not sure if I did something different :/
Anyway, here is Ubuntu 11.10 running Gnome 3 (I love Gnome 3 so much… I want its babies) with a working 15″ touchscreen.
UPDATE : Once I restarted the computer I found the touchscreen didn’t work automatically though when I entered
sudo inputattach -mtouch /dev/ttyS4
into the terminal it started up again.
It needs to start automatically since I won’t have a keyboard on this computer.
To get it working automatically the following should work.
You need to edit the rc.local file by entering this into the terminal :
gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local
and then add the following lines at the bottom :
inputattach -mtouch /dev/ttyS4 &
above exit 0 and save it.
Then in theory it should start automatically next time you reboot. Mine is a bit funny. For some reason it will only start if I am touching the screen during boot. Basically from the grub screen onwards I have to touch the screen or my pcmcia serial card won’t start… which is annoying, but put-up-with-able.
January 1st, 2012 by sephiroth