penmount input drivers

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 10:38:59PM +0000, daryl kuchay wrote:
> Dear Developers,
> 
> I operate a website that deals with the penmount hardware in relation to
> the xf86-input-penmount package. http://webdt.org Sadly, xinput_calibrator,
> the only known way to calibrate the unit aside from the proprietary
> vendor's gCal application (only built on i686 emulator and the hardware is
> i586, aka vendor support is nonexistant) only came out recently when
> compared to the lineage of the driver. The vendors solution created a mess
> in init and slowed Xorg down considerably. Since discovering
> xinput_calibrator a year ago I have put attention to developing linux
> versions for the WebDT hardware from DT Research. As the units only have
> 500mb flash drives I am testing on Porteus and Slax linux for their small
> dormant footprints. I would be happy to test.
> 
> Not sure if my attached logs will make it to the mailing list or not
> however I just built kernel 3.9.8 and all the needed switches for the
> hardware in question. After installing latest linux console tools and
> inputattach utility, calling it on rc.local, modprobing penmount and
> installing the latest xf86-input-penmount-1.5.0  from slackware-current I
> got a segfault in init. I do have mtdev or multitouch libraries installed.
> I will null the squashfs module and reboot to see if it makes any heap of
> change. If so I will repost. If not please let me know what I can do to
> help. If writing my own driver is at hand I wound not have the skills
> needed. Please know that the linux community has only been able to use your
> driver for the last year or so due to the gCal necessity and non
> cooperative nature of the vendor. Please dont throw in the towel now.

penmount hasn't seen any driver updates for quite a while and the driver is
unmaintained. if you see segfaults on server startup, my first guess is that
the ABI has changed sufficiently that the driver doesn't work anymore. I
don't have a penmount device and neither do any of the other X developers -
that's the reason the driver is now unmaintained.

I strongly suggest that you get your device working with the kernel (there
is a penmount.c) and then use the evdev driver.

Cheers,
   Peter