For the tech-savvy or tech-curious: RKVS Raman's UbuntuStudio work-around on the HP TouchSmart PC!

Getting the most out of a HP TouchSmart PC...

I have a TouchSmart, and if I wasn't so busy at my job, I would love to spend my time digging into the core of the system.

Thanks, RKVS Raman, for your explanation about the way to identify the NextWindow touch screen as an input device in the HP TouchSmart PC using UbuntuStudio. This was something I was curious about.

Here is RKVS Raman's "how-to", from his RKVS Raman Blogs

"This gotcha explains how we made it to work.

1) Installed xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2) HP Touch Smart uses NextWindow TouchScreen. The tricky part was to find which input device is connected. An cat /proc/buc/input/devices pointed wrongly to event2.
3) After googling a lot, we found evtest. Downloaded evtest.c and compile it.
4) Ran evtest as root with various input devices like /dev/input/event[1...X]
5) One of the runs showed Input Device as NextWindow TouchScreen. That was the one. The device was /dev/input/event4

Input driver version is 1.0.0
Input device ID: bus 0x3 vendor 0x596 product 0x1 version 0x200
Input device name: "NextWindow TouchScreen"
Supported events:
Event type 0 (Reset)
Event code 0 (Reset)
Event code 1 (Key)
Event code 3 (Absolute)
Event type 1 (Key)
Event code 330 (Touch)
Event type 3 (Absolute)
Event code 0 (X)
Value 0
Min 0
Max 32687
Event code 1 (Y)
Value 0
Min 0
Max 32687

6) Made the necessary changes to our xorg.conf according to this page. Change the /dev/input/event1 to the device that we found as connected to touchscreen (/dev/input/event4) through our evtest runs.

7) Saved xorg.conf and rebooted. And Voila, touchscreen works.

Now that touchscreen works, let me load Sugar, it's gonna be fun."

Sugar is the core of the One Laptop Per Child (OLAP) Human Interface. It can be emulated on a PC, but doesn't have all of the features of the original.

Of interest to computer students and armchair technologists:

RKVS Raman teaches data structures (and artificial intelligence?), at least from what I gather from his blog posts.

I liked the link to a B-tree animation applet. If you are a computer student, remember not to confuse a B-tree with a binary tree!

There is more. RKVS Raman has an interesting post about Dijkstra's Algorithm and Human Psyche.

Dijkstra's algorithm