xorg.conf - what to do for an input device

[Dan Nicholson]

2009/1/24 Paulo Cavalcanti <promac at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I was looking at xorg.conf on Fedora 10, and
> my question is: what is the correct approach,
> when an input device does not work as it was supposed to?
>
> In my case, I have an old tablet (Genius) that was detected,
> but its surface area is not mapped correctly onto the screen.
> Moving the stylus less than half an inch, makes the cursor cross
> the entire screen.
>
> In the past, I used an alternative driver, which was configured
> in xorg.conf. Now, this same driver has an undefined external
> reference "xf86errno" in F10.
>
> Even if I fix the driver, since the input devices are detected
> automatically,
> the only way (I see) of using the alternative driver is including
>
> Section "ServerFlags"
>         Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
> EndSection
>
> in xorg.conf. But this will force me to specify all other
> input drivers one by one, in xorg.conf, that is, it is an
> "all or nothing" approach. Is that correct?

Yeah. An alternative is just to disable hotplugging from HAL for a
specific device. Until the features I needed were ported to the evdev
driver, I had to keep using mouse for my trackpoint. By removing the
input.x11_driver field, Xorg won't try to hotplug it:

$ cat /etc/hal/fdi/policy/no-hotplug-trackpoint.fdi
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
   <match key="info.product" contains="TrackPoint">
     <remove key="input.x11_driver"/>
   </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

Look at the lshal output to find appropriate fields to match on for your device.

> The other option is trying to make the detected driver
> use  the correct mapping, by suppling some parameters.
>
> According to the instructions available here
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/EvdevInputDriver
>
> I would have to look at this file:
>
>  /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-tabletPCs.fdi
>
> However, I did not see anything that I could change
> to fix my problem.

I'm not really sure how the tablet calibration works. What was the old
driver you were trying to use?

--
Dan