Toshiba Portege M400 Debian Linux Squeeze 6.0.3 Install Note #1 - Touchscreen

The M400 tablet PC has a Wacom touch screen electronics. This appears as a serial device. Because of this, there is no need to install wacom kernel drivers! This means there's nothing found by any of dmesg , lshw nor discover !

However Squeeze does not recognize the touch screen of the M400 tablet PC. So the command

xinput list

does not show the device.

This down to an upstream bug as follows https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xf86-input-wacom/+bug/522318

This fix is to apply the above patch to the file /lib/udev/rules.d/69-xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules. Then reboot.

Debug aids:

You can test the device by running

cat /dev/ttyS? | od

then move the pen around. On my machine I found that running the command

cat /dev/ttyS0 | od

produced output when my pen was moved. You may have to try all the /dev/ttyS* devices.

When patched and working, you will see this:

$ xinput list

⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]

⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]

⎜ ↳ Microsoft Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse v2.0 id=9 [slave pointer (2)]

⎜ ↳ PS/2 Mouse id=11 [slave pointer (2)]

⎜ ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint id=12 [slave pointer (2)]

⎜ ↳ Serial Wacom Tablet eraser id=13 [slave pointer (2)]

⎜ ↳ Serial Wacom Tablet id=14 [slave pointer (2)]

And hwinfo reports:

# hwinfo

10: udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pnp_WACf004_serial_platform_0'
linux.device_file = '/dev/ttyS0'
linux.hotplug_type = 2 (0x2)
linux.subsystem = 'tty'
info.capabilities = { 'serial' }
info.category = 'serial'
info.subsystem = 'tty'
info.product = 'Wacom Serial Tablet PC Pen Tablet/Digitizer'
linux.sysfs_path = '/sys/devices/pnp0/00:0c/tty/ttyS0'
info.parent = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pnp_WACf004'
info.udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pnp_WACf004_serial_platform_0'
serial.originating_device = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pnp_WACf004'
serial.device = '/dev/ttyS0'
serial.port = 0 (0x0)
serial.type = 'platform'