Debian's evdev patches and evdev's /tmp/.X11-unix/evdev0
I'm evaluating Debina's evdev patches to xorg-x11 (or perhaps Gentoo's
adapation of Mr. Hull's original patches it isn't clear.)
I'm trying to figure out if they can be made to work in other distributions
and if they can be generalized to the point where they have a better chance
of gaining wide spread acceptance. At very least I would like to add more
info to a howto wrt/ how to get them working with a USB switch.
I have patched the sources and built xorg-x11. The X server work fine in
general however the evdev driver either does not deal with USB
connect/disconnects (i.e. using a USB switch to share a keyboard and mouse
between two keyboards) or it requires some kind of helper (which I haven't
found.)
My test box has a mouse shared using a USB switch between two boxes. The
Linux box uses evdev and the other is a Windozes XP box. When I use the
switch XP works properly but evdev based mouse seems to freeze after the
first switch and stays frozen until I restart X (or logout and login again.)
I have found tmp/.X11-unix/evdev0 but am missing usage details. This almost
looks like it could be used with some kind of hotplug script but I can't
find one. Can someone provide me with some info on how that pipe is supposed
to be used and/or any information on how to make the driver USB switch
friendly?
My previous X configuration without the three patch files (and associated
config file entries) worked most of the time (on rare occasion I had to
switch back and forth twice.) Unfortunately without the patches a user is
forced to live with duplicated mouse buttons due to X PS/2 driver
limitations (or something like that.)
Here is the bug attempting to get the drivers added to xorg:
http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=968
Patches 9000,9001 and 9002 from Gentoo seem to be Zephaniah E. Hull's
original Debian code adapted to apply to 6.8.0 (works on 6.8.1 too.):
http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/xorg-x11/patchsets/6.8.0/patch/
Here is the howto site which started this process:
http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=46
Regards,
Rob
--
---------------------"Happiness is understanding."----------------------
Robert Hardy, B.Eng Computer Systems C.E.O. Webcon Inc.
rhardy <at> webcon <dot> ca GPG Key available (613) 276-7327
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