# Here's a question for people with touch screens

## omnicloud

I have a Elo Touchscreen that is no longer supported because it's too old. What do I need to compile into the kernel and what device do I use to catch the input from it?

http://www.elotouchsystems.com/

EDIT: By the way, it's a serial interface touch monitor.

EDIT AGAIN: I almost had it working but I ran into a problem. I didn't have serial mouse enabled so I figured that was the problem. I enabled it and then cat'd the serial port and then touched the screen. When I touched it, it constantly clicked until I clicked with the regular mouse.Last edited by omnicloud on Sat Apr 30, 2005 5:12 pm; edited 1 time in total

----------

## omnicloud

EDIT in above post

----------

## elvisthedj

I just bid on one of these things on ebay..  Always happens to me, I bid, THEN I research..  God I suck..

Oh well..  I came here before I went to google, so maybe there is hope.  How hard can it be to make a driver for this thing?? (for a programmer that is  :Wink:  )

----------

## danpixley

I am currently working on getting a Planar PT1503NT working in Linux.  The problem I had for a bit was that this touchscreen was supposed to be installed on Redhat since my coworker here that has been doing most of this project is a Redhat man.  I was given the task of getting the elo drivers to work.  Most of the documentation that you see out there is for Redhat 7.3 and is outdated (I couldn't get it to work on 7.3 anyway).

To make a long story short, I found that xorg includes a driver: /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/elographics_drv.o that works.  The funny thing is that this driver doesn't work with the installation of xorg provided by Redhat Enterprise Linux4-ES-u3.  I had to copy the driver from my Gentoo box (yay Gentoo), which currently has xorg-x11-6.8.2-r6 (Redhat's rpm -q came back with xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.EL.13.25; you figure out the difference).  In addition, Gentoo's installation of xorg provided me with an example configuration in xorg.conf (commented out by default).  

The touchscreen now works in Redhat after replacing the Redhat one with the Gentoo xorg driver (you test the device by doing # od -h -w10 </dev/ttyS0).  My only problem now is getting it to actually function as a clicking device.  I am not sure what I have to do to make this work.  I currently have a PS/2 mouse on the system.  I am going to try disabling the mouse and see if the touchscreen can act as a mouse.  If that works, I will try to get the mouse working AND the touchscreen working, but if not than I will be at yet another speedbump.

Dan

----------

## ozzy

Hi all,

  This is my happy story with ELO touch screens and linux. 

 First, the hardware used was IBM SurePOS 500, model 4840. Detailed specs could be found on IBM site. I tried following distros, in this order:

   1. WhiteBox 3 - kernel 2.4 series

   2. WhiteBox 4 - kernel 2.6.9 

   3. Suse Linux Enterprise server 9 - 2.6 kernel series

 I tried out public drivers from ELO, both source tarball and RPM. There is no difference since RPM package does exactly the same thing docs in source tarball tells U to do.  :Smile:  And docs in tarball are so badly written that it hurts like hell.  :Smile: 

 First of all, I tried all the variants of kernel drivers, Xorg and XFree3/4 drivers and let me tell U, THEESE DO NOT WORK. Tried 'em on all possible combinations of kernel-Xsystem and it was all for nothing. Both Xorg and XFree3/4 DID recognize the driver but the touch screen would always behive as plain screen  :Smile:  no touch no nothing. And what was even more driving me nuts is the fact that there was no errors in logs. 

  After a 2000th reboot, i saw something in the dmesg!!!! During boot process, there were 6 ttyS* ports detected and when I loged on, setserial only gave me 4 ttyS* ports. So, this had to be the reason why my serial touchscreen didn't work. I found out that dmesg gave me ttyS0,1,14,15,44 and 45 but, when I log in, ttyS44 and ttyS45 were gone. So I picked up the memory addresses and IRQ ports and created device nodes, assigned them to ttyS44 and ttyS45 and that was it. 

 After doing all the modifications needed, seting up all the stuff in xorg.conf, everithing worked like a charm. Always use the calibration program for motif. 

And for those who notice that non-root users cannot login in X after setting up the touchscreen, let me save U some time. Idiotic install script from ELO sets wrong permissions on /dev directory so be sure to set "chmod 755 /dev" somewhere in /etc/rc.local (for RH-like distros) or /etc/conf.d/local.start in beloved gentoo.

I hope that this will solve so many problems with this piece of hardware since google and lots of other search engines gave me nothing on this matter. I spent 2 weeks fighting those jerks in ELO (and IBM is not far away) and hope hat someone could make IBM twist ELOs arm to release better drivers for linux.

  Cheers....

 [/b]

----------

