Mint 12 Thinkpad X201 Touchscreen

[jmflyer]

Out of the box, my Thinkpad X201 Touchscreen didn't work, so I thought I would post how I got it working.

The X201 has a Wacom serial touch screen. The first thing to do is make sure the modules are loaded:

Code: Select all

sudo modprobe wacom wacom_w8001

You can add this to /etc/modules to ensure they are loaded on boot:

Code: Select all

sudo echo wacom >> /etc/modules

Then figure out where it's attaching:

Code: Select all

grep -i 'wacom' /var/log/syslog

yields something like:

Code: Select all

Mar  3 13:22:09 mylaptop kernel: [20322.211375] input: Wacom Serial Penabled 2FG Touchscreen as /devices/pnp0/00:0b/tty/ttyS4/serio17/input/input24

You can see that mine is ttyS4 (/dev/ttyS4)

Next is to make it usable:

Code: Select all

inputattach --w8001 /dev/ttyS4

You can make this persist on reboots by adding it to /etc/rc.local:

Code: Select all

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Here is mine:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.
inputattach --w8001 /dev/ttyS4
exit 0

Now you can go to 'System Settings', select 'Wacom Graphics Tablet', and it should have all kinds of options for configuring it that didn't show up before.

The new window manager makes it really nifty to use. Great work Mint development team, and thank you!

[Favux]

Hi jmflyer,

Thank you for sharing that.

I'd like to bring up a couple of points. The Thinkpad X201t has a serial Wacom digitizer, or in linuxwacom speak an ISDV4 device. Currently all ISDV4 devices are tablet PCs.

With the introduction of the serio driver wacom_w8001.ko there are now two ways to get an ISDV4 device to work. The "old" way through the ISDV4 support built into the Wacom X driver xf86-input-wacom (in the xserver-xorg-input-wacom package) or through the new wacom_w8001.ko.

The wacom (or wacom.ko) module is for USB Wacom tablets and so is not used by your X201t. Which is why it wasn't auto-loading. So there is no need to add it to /etc/modules. What the wacom_w8001.ko does is essentially change the serial input into "usb" input through the kernel. And it needs inputattach in order to work and create the /dev/input node of a usb device instead of the /dev/ttyS* port of a serial device.

From what you are saying it appears xf86-input-wacom was installed. So your X201t should have worked out of the box without using wacom_w8001.ko. This makes me wonder if Mint 12 hasn't introduced a udev rule to support the wacom_w8001.ko module that interferes with the udev rules (if any) and driver match to ISDV4 devices in the 50-wacom.conf at /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d. I know several other Distros have inadvertently done that and prevented ISDV4 devices from working out of the box as intended. If so, after finding where the udev rule is located and commenting it out, the X201t should work without the need for inputattach or wacom_w8001.ko.

All that said there is no reason I know of not to use wacom_w8001.ko. At some point in the future the tentative plan is to remove the ISDV4 support in xf86-input-wacom in favor of the serio method.

[Favux]

Alright I found the rule. It is in /lib/udev/rules.d/40-inputattach.rules.

Code: Select all

# Attach Wacom W8001 devices
SUBSYSTEM=="tty", KERNEL=="ttyS[0-9]*", ATTRS{id}=="FUJ02e5|WACf00c", ACTION=="add|change", RUN+="/lib/udev/inputattach --daemon --baud 19200 --w8001 /dev/%k"

So you would comment it out:

Code: Select all

# Attach Wacom W8001 devices
#SUBSYSTEM=="tty", KERNEL=="ttyS[0-9]*", ATTRS{id}=="FUJ02e5|WACf00c", ACTION=="add|change", RUN+="/lib/udev/inputattach --daemon --baud 19200 --w8001 /dev/%k"

I also noticed, just like Ubuntu, they are still using the old serial/ISDV4 rules in 69-xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules rather than the new ones: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/l ... blet_rules Which may or may not also cause problems.

[jmflyer]

Favux,

That is much easier than what I posted, I tried it and it worked perfectly. Thanks for the improvement.

[Favux]

Hi jmflyer,

Thanks for testing. Having two solutions to the problem is a good thing.