Lifebook B Series Touchscreen Driver

For Kernel 2.6 you need a special driver -- for Linux kernel 2.4 you can use the driver below.

This touchscreen driver for the Lifebook B series can only be used for kernel 2.4. Initially this driver was developed by Harald Hoyer for XFree 3.x.x. His driver for XFree 3.x.x can befound at www.parzelle.de. Harald also did the major work of reverse engineering the protocol of the touchscreen.

This driver for XFree 4.x.x is a complete rewrite and was developed by me on a Lifebook 2175 B but it should work on earlier versions of this notebook as well as newer versions. Maybe Fujitsu chooses to provide me a more recent model of this cool machine if they like my driver as I do ;-).

Features

Click with the pen only (Just touch the surface of the touchscreen for a short time)
Drag with the pen only (Touch the surface and remain on the same point for a while. After this a MousePress-event is issued. --> now you can drag an item around)
Configurable behaviour of the touchpanel using timers ( see advanced configuration)
Virtual Screen support (thanks to Ralf Z.)

Installation/Configuration

Download the binary tarball and extract its content to some directory (tar xzvf tarballname). Copy the file "lbtouch_drv.o" to the appropriate location ("/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input").
Insert the lines below to the file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "touchscreen"
    Driver "lbtouch"
    Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option "DeviceName" "touchscreen"
    Option "MinX" "98"
    Option "MinY" "43"
    Option "MaxX" "940"
    Option "MaxY" "925"
    Option "ReportingMode" "Raw"
    Option "Emulate3Buttons"
    Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
    Option "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection
Add the line below to the file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to the section ServerLayout.
InputDevice "touchscreen" "CorePointer"
If you want to do the calibration read the file Readme.calibration for further details but the calibration is not neccesary to use the touchscreen.
It is EXTREMELY Important that you don't have two drivers configured which use the same PS2-device (/dev/psaux). You DO NOT need to have an extra mouse-driver for the quick-pointing device which is integrated to the keyboard. It is also handled by the touchscreen-driver. If you want to be sure just delete all mouse-related stuff from your XFree-Configfile (/etc/X11/XF86Config-4).

Advanced Configuration

If you are not confident with the default behaviour of your touchpanel you can configure certain timers which change its behaviour.

Option	Description	Default-Value
ClickTimer	This timer starts to run if the screen is touched with the pen. If the pen untouches the screen before the timer expires a "left Mouse click" is produced.	500 ms
DragTimer	This timer also starts to run as soon as the screen is touched. If the pen stays within a radius of "MoveLimit" (see below) pixels UNTIL this timer is expired a "mouse press" event is generated.	300 ms
Emulate3Timeout	If both buttons are pressed/released before this timer expires a "middle press/release"-event is generated. This timer starts to run as soon as a button is pressed.	70 ms
MoveLimit	If the pen moves out of this radius a "mouse-press"-event becomes inpossible.	12 Pixels

Advanced Example

...(see above)
    Option "ReportingMode" "Raw"
    Option "Emulate3Buttons"
    Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
    Option "DragTimer" "0"
    Option "ClickTimer" "0"
    Option "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

If you find bugs or if you have comment/wishes please send mail to lifebook@conan.de

Troubleshooting

Some users report that their cursor is jumping all over the place either directly on login or after a suspend/resume. This is caused by a failing touchscreen initialization. This behaviour was observed with Version 0.74 and seems to occur only with very few users (at least very few have complained). On my laptop (B2175) this version works perfectly. Due to the lack of other hardware I can't debug this problem and have to recommend to use either V0.73 or switch to kernel 2.6 and the combination of a kernel driver and the evtouch-X-driver.

Another workaround for this problem is to switch to a text-console and back to X. When doing this the initialization-procedure is called again and hopefully succeeds on the second/third try.

Download/Stable

Since no one seemed to complain about the unstable release V0.7.0 I decided to declare the 0.7.x-series stable.

The 0.7.x releases are a major step forward. It includes a new calibration program, so the mouse-pointer is always exactly under the pen. To do the calibration have a look at the file "README.calibration" which is included in the tarball. At the moment you have to edit some configuration files by hand. But if you can't do that don't worry. You DO NOT HAVE TO do the calibration.

Please note: The binary tarballs for V0.7.x are only for XFree V4.2.x. If you want to run the driver on 4.1.x you have to compile from the sources or use V0.6.8 (I recommend upgrading X to V 4.2.x)

Binary V0.7.4 (for Xfree 4.2 and higher)	lbtouch-0.7.4.tar.gz
Binary V0.7.3	lbtouch-0.7.3.tar.gz
Sources V0.7.4	lbtouch-0.7.4-src.tar.gz
Sources V0.7.3	lbtouch-0.7.3-src.tar.gz