any touch screen experience there?

[Peter L. Peres]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:

> Just wonder if there is anybody around who knows something how touch screens 
> work under Linux?
>
> The company I have some work with sells kiosks with touch screens. They 
> operate on Windows. It would be wonderfull to change their OS to Linux, 
> wouldnt it?
>
> At the moment I do not know much technical details, but I will know more, 
> soon.

There are 2 kinds. Those that emulate usb mice and those that emulate 
serial mice. The serial kind works fine, except you have to accomodate 
their calibration software somehow (sometimes this may require dual boot 
into opendos - it might work with dosemu). The calibrations stays put 
once calibrated (almost no drift with 'always on' computers, like 
kiosks). I have no experience with the usb kind.

The touchscreen 'looks' like a mouse for all practical purposes. Most 
touchscreens do pointer motion to coordinates of touch (absolute) and 
emit a left click event for each user touch. This means you must make 
applications work without dragging and on 'left click' only. There are 
ways around this but reliability suffers.

good luck,
Peter
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