Does XOrg not have any proper HID support at all?

Cedric Sodhi manday at gmx.net
Sat Jul 24 03:24:05 PDT 2010


Hello, this is a serious question and a serious issue, as far I can see. 
For the last month I've been trying all possible workarrounds an tricks 
I could possibly imagine to get XOrg accept a

6 Degrees Of Freedom HID compliant Input Device

as Input. And after one month I stand, though more frustrated, where I 
stood before. Not only is there a lack of alternatives to the canonical 
input drivers mouse and evdev, latter, which I supposedly replacing the 
mousedrv is furthermore inferiour to the former and, considering the 
time for which HID is a widely accepted standard, poorly functional.

A unindentificable and unverificable man-page which I found online [1] 
makes claim of far enhanced configuration for evdev but I find no trace 
of such capabilities anywhere on any distribution.

The lack of a GENERIC HID driver, something which is widely implemented 
by various software (GIMP for example supports HID from a raw input 
stream from /dev/input out of the box - although with limited 
configuration) in XOrg is severe!

Many devices which are designed HID compliant and are thus supposed to 
work out-of-the box with any contemporary operating system (not just 
Windows) do simply not function with X unless there is a specific Driver 
for the device.

If I had the experience with driver programming I'd immediately get to 
work - it must be trivial with the readily available set of HID 
libraries, and I think any more experienced programmer could make a 
half-decent HID driver in notime - although calibration and keymapping 
would be mandatory - or is XInput too unflexible to handle arbitrary HID 
input?

--MD


More information about the xorg-devel mailing list