Linux on Dialogue Flybook

News 2008-08-22:

New version, 1.1, has been released! The new version also works with the Flybook V5 model. See download section.

News 2008-08-10:

I've created a mailing list for discussing the penmountlpc driver, and Flybook touchscreen issues in general. Subscribe for latest news on penmountlpc development!

News 2008-08-10:

I've also created a project at Google Code to host the source code. The latest, cutting-edge, version of the driver is always in the Subversion repository there.

News 2008-08-03:

Installation on Debian (and probably Ubuntu as well) just got a lot simpler; I got around to package the driver as a Debian source package.

Touchscreen driver overview

Check out Alex's site for an excellent description of the installation process and various hardware.

The most tricky part in running Linux on the Flybook was the touchscreen. I reverse engineered the interface by poking the I/O ports, and figured out how to read the X/Y-coordinates from it.

Elmar Hanlhofer figured out the init sequence needed to initialize the device, and added that to my original patch. Many thanks, Elmar! Also thanks to Christoph Pittracher that also made some modifications to the patch.

Download

The latest release is available at the Google Code download page. You can also find the latest development version in the SVN repository there.

Installation

On Debian, simply download the .deb package and install it with module-assistant: 
dpkg -i penmountlpc-source_<version>_all.deb
m-a penmountlpc

On other platforms, download and extract the tarball. Then use 

make
make install
to install.

After installation, use "modprobe penmountlpc" to load the driver.

Misc

Here's a patch that adds support for absolute mouse events to the gpm evdev interface. Patch against gpm 1.20.1.
gpm-flybook-20050213.diff

For Xorg support, see the evtouch driver at http://www.stz-softwaretechnik.de/~ke/lifebook/ . There's also a Debian package of that, xserver-xorg-input-evtouch, in the Debian repository.

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@iki.fi.nospam>
Updated: 22.8.2008