touch screen woes: penmount / aquapad

[Franco Saliola]

Hello.

I'm working on a little project over the holidays. And I need some help. :-)

I recently got me hands on an aquapad. It is a tablet PC. See [1],
[2], [3], [4] for more information. It came with Windows CE installed,
and with a Midori linux installation on an accompanying CompactFlash
card (it can boot from the CF card slot).

I'm trying to install Debian 3.1 on this machine, but I can't get the
touch screen working. The touch screen is apparantly a PenMount
DMC9000 which has linux drivers, but I followed the provided
instructions and get no action.

First questions: Does anyone have any experience with touch screens
under linux? Does anyone have one of these?

One of the problems I am having is identifying the device from within
Debian. The documentation with the drivers suggest that the device
should connect to ttyS0 or ttyS1. But when I do 'cat /dev/ttyS0' and
touch the screen, I get no action. When I do the same with ttyS1 I get
a complaint about a busy device or resource.

So my third question is: how does one find how a device is interacting
with the system?

Some things to note: The touchscreen does work. It works with the
Windows CE installation (under which I can't get wireless working;
plus it's not linux). It also works with the Midori linux
installation. But just barely. The driver that is being used there is
a patched version of mk712, along with a patched version of X, a
patched kernel and some software to translate screen presses to X
events.

I compiled a 2.6 kernel with mk712 support enabled. I think the device
is recognized by the machine. I get "0x260 at IRQ 10" during the boot
message. But a corresponding entry under /dev isn't created. I grabbed
the major and minor device numbers from the kernel documentation and
mknod'd /dev/tscreen, but it doesn't correspond to a device apparently
since 'cat /dev/tscreen' complains.

If you've read this far, I thank you. And please send me any comments
you have as I might have overlooked (or most likely, don't know)
something trivial.

Franco

[1] http://www.fic.com.tw/product/mobile/aquapad
[2] http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2255681925.html
[3] http://rumkin.com/reference/aquapad
[4] http://www.transmetazone.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=958
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