The Touchscreen

The CF-18 comes in two variants, one with a digitizer (that requires a special stylus to use the screen) and one with a tratditional touchscreen (which can be used with your fingers). The description here is only valid for the touchscreen model.

To make the touchscreen work under Debian, I had to recompile the "evtouch" driver from the upstream sources. The Debian driver did not work for me. Thankfully, the whole process is pretty straightforward:

• Download the driver from the maintainers homepage
• Install all source dependencies for the driver:
  apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-evtouch
• Compile the driver and copy it to Debians Xorg driver directory

Edit your xorg.conf to add basic support for the TS:

Section "InputDevice"
 	Identifier "Touchscreen"
	Driver "evtouch"        
	Option "Device" "/dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-3-event-mouse"
	Option "DeviceName" "Touchscreen"
	Option "Calibrate" "1"
	Option "ReportingMode" "Raw"
	Option "Emulate3Buttons"
	Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
	Option "SendCoreEvents" "On"
EndSection 

Now the touchscreen needs to be calibrated. Usually one can use the calibration tool of the evtouch driver, but I had to resort to other means. The only functional calibration tool at the time of writing was calibrator.c (build script).

Download calibrator.c and the build script into the same directory and compile the tool with

sh make_calibrator

Run the tool and follow the onscreen instructions by touching the blinking targets. When done, the tool pastes the calibration data into the console so you can add it to your xorg.conf. Do not forget to remove the Calibrate 1 option. Also, this touchscreen requires the SwapY setting:

# My fully calibrated and  working touchscreen definition
Section "InputDevice"
         Identifier "Touchscreen"
         Driver "evtouch"        
	 Option "Device" "/dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-3-event-mouse"
         Option "DeviceName" "Touchscreen"
#	 Option "Calibrate" "1"
         Option "MinX" "88"
         Option "MinY" "930"
         Option "MaxX" "945"
         Option "MaxY" "62"
         Option "ReportingMode" "Raw"
         Option "Emulate3Buttons"
         Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
         Option "SendCoreEvents" "On"
         Option "SwapY"
EndSection 

Done!

Files of interest

• My xorg.conf
• Xorg.0.log
• The output of lspci