The other day i found a very special computer, that is built into a touch screen monitor (resistive i believe, comes with a stylus), in the trash. Its body is extremely rugged made of cast aluminium and with fat rubber protectors on the sides. Looking at it’s specs i found out it is equipped with an i7 processor, 2x11,1V batteries, SIM card reader, WiFi, SD card reader, 3xUSB. I’m pretty shure this thing was quite expensive when new and it can’t be that old either. There is no branding on it or anything, so i can’t look it up on google, but i’m starting to think i just found gold here.
However i tried to fire it up, but the hard drive seems broken, so i made a bootable linux USB stick and it seems to work like a charm except for the drive.
The touch screen is completely uncalibrated though, so i was hoping to find a way to calibrate it.
I did find a site that might have the solution, but the thing is i’m totally green when it comes to Linux, so i was hoping someone here might give me a push?
Here is the site:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touchscreen
If i understand correctly i have to install a driver:
If your device is built into a laptop, you’ll have the best luck with the mtouch, touchright, touchwin, or touchit213 drivers. Likewise, non-Elo external touchscreens will most likely use touchit213. If your device is a tablet with stylus-only input, fujitsu is a popular maker of embedded tablet devices.
Not shure how to though…
To me this is black art:
Calibration
Thanks to the wonderful work of the freedesktop.org developers, calibration is no longer a black art in Linux. The calibration utility is included in Ubuntu 12.04 and later:
sudo apt-get install xinput-calibrator
And for 10.04, there’s a ppa available:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tias/xinput-calibrator-ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install xinput-calibratorPackages and source files are available for other distroshere.
The use is pretty straight forward. I had issues getting it to work properly with HAL, however this will work regardless:
xinput_calibrator --output-type xinput
Follow the instructions pressing each target, and the calibration output will be printed to the terminal. The calibration will be set immediately, but will not survive reboots. If you’re using GDM, you can put the calibration command in your /etc/gdm/Init/Default. I placed calibration values for my XR-1 in both GDM and as a gnome startup script, since it uses automatic login:
/usr/bin/xinput set-prop “Sahara Touch-iT213 Serial TouchScreen” “Evdev Axis Inversion” 0 1
/usr/bin/xinput set-int-prop “Sahara Touch-iT213 Serial TouchScreen” “Evdev Axis Calibration” 32 27 2027 39 1977
Should i write these commands in the ‘terminal’?
Do i have to replace the hard drive and install a full installation of Ubuntu on it to get the drivers i need?
Is there a distro with all i need and ready to go once i install it?