OESF Portables Forum

General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: iamasmith on March 25, 2005, 08:17:41 am

Title: X.org Display Server
Post by: iamasmith on March 25, 2005, 08:17:41 am
I was playing around with the mouse support offered by InputHelper the other day and it became fairly abvious that InputHelper wouldn't really offer me what I wanted with regard to Mouse support under XQT when running PocketDebian.

The nature of InputHelper mouse support seems to be that it will track USB mouse movements and display via the frame buffer a mouse cursor... it seems to call Qtopia to render the portion of the display where  the cursor has moved away from which causes problems for apps that go fullscreen (ScummVM on libSDL for one) where the mechanism seems to bring the task bar to the foreground.

Furthermore when running something like XQT the actual display server cursor for XQT doesn't track the InputHelper cursor.. you basically move the InputHelper cursor, click and the XQT cursor hops... this is straightforward behaviour when you consider it because InputHelper is actually spoofing screen taps for the touch display.

It would seem sensible that InputHelper and XQT are not the best combination because if you want to run XQT fullscreen then InputHelper keeps bringing up the taskbar and dropping XQT out of fullscreen, also the X cursor of XQT doesn't track.

My goal is to have a nice PocketWorkstation where I can use the mouse properly with the X display server so it would seem sensible to have the X server handle the mouse movements and forget InputHelper whilst using the X server... the problem with this is that XQT seems to be built directly against Qtopia input with no means of changing the configuration to handle the mouse itself... it simply relies on the Qtopia touchscreen events.

Being monolithic the XQT server also seems to lack the configuration possibilities that a more standard display server would offer.

I'm wondering if anyone has tinkered with the x.org server that is part of the netbsd distribution for the SL-C3000. Apparently they have display (possibly just using fbdev) and touch screen support for the devices.

I'm also wondering if the best thing would be to build a version of x.org and port the Qtopia display driver from XQT into that so that you had a standard X server that had a couple of modules for display/input - one for fbdev and one for Qtopia + the option to use standard mouse drivers present with the distribution.

This would be an interesting way of approaching the display server issue and with reasonably simple scripting it would be possible to have the configuration automatically decide if it was running under Qtopia or not and use either the Qtopia driver or the fbdev driver directly.

What are your thoughts?

Andy
Title: X.org Display Server
Post by: adf on March 25, 2005, 11:35:00 am
I had seen the same issue (though I haven't been using pocket workstation much lately). That would be a really interesting, versatile solution.  I have no idea how to go about it, But yeah..really good idea!  (though, since i use an ir keyboard, any chance we can look into lirc keyboard support in the new x-server too?  I think ir kbds are pretty common peripherals....)