Bluetooth mouse? Possible?
 

Anyone have some input on the possibility for getting a bluetooth mouse to work on the 770 as well as the keyboard?

Some things are really rather nice to have a mouse for, not least plain surfing. A scroll wheel to go up/down on the page would kick a lot of butt right there.

You'd think it would be doable, but is there something preventing it?

I've wondered the same thing. While the 770 w/ BT keyboard works great (OS 2005), a mouse is really needed. I've messed with BT mice under XP and they don't seem to have taken off very well (lack of HID profile, I'd guess).

Seems fairly simple to implement as the 770 already supports HID (or rather the BT plugin does). But I wonder about the lack of any sort of hardware cursor. Isn't that really needed?

Brad.

A mouse would be cool, but it is kind of useless on such a small screen. I think the touchscreen would work much better...

Well, you're right, until you pair your 770 with a bluetooth keyboard. I've found it cumbersome to use the touchscreen while I've got the keyboard out. But that's just me.

Brad.

I'd also like to know if a bluetooth mouse would work. It would definately give another dimension to navigation on the 770.

Looking at http://770.fs-security.com/maemo-bt-plugin/ they mention that Bluetooth connectivity is provided through the BlueZ stack and that seems to include mouse functionality. It definitely can't be impossible to get a mouse working on this thing, but it does unfortunately seem to be beyond my capabilities to do so.

Look up the old threads about this : it was proved impossible months ago with the 2005 OS, not because of BT but due to the X server (no hardware cursor or something). Maybe it'll be different in the 2006 version.

Ah. I did do some searches but didn't spot it here anyway. Thanks for the info.

Too bad though, but getting the keyboard to work was the important bit, the mouse would just be gravy. :)

Well, not *impossible*. Just more work than anyone's done yet...

Quite."unpractical" would have been a better choice.
Every time I use that 'impossible' word I regret it :-)

It should be possible, we are using X after all, but the cursor is usually hidden on the 770. It does exist, I often see the 'timer' cursor when opera is loading.
It does not matter if a hardware cursor is available, X.org fully supports software cursors.
My suspicion is that the default cursors have simply been made completely transparent. Check out /usr/share/icons/xcursor-transparent.

One thing to remember is that the UI was specifically designed as a touch-screen interface. A mouse would be useless in most respects...

I'm not sure I agree. Just surfing with a scroll-wheel - especially one that could be locked to scroll the screen by pushing down the scroll-wheel - would be great.

It wouldn't be a huge deal to get a mouse working on the 770, but I'm sure it would be nice. Reaching for the pen and tapping on the screen all the time works but it's not as comfortable as a mouse would be.

Regular X cursor themes works on the 770. I did some experiments with this some weeks ago. I downloaded jimmacs cursors from here , and I put them in the right directory on the 770 (/usr/share/user-icons), and modified the default/index.theme file to load jimmacs cursors instead (it's the cursors that come as standard on an ubuntu install). It worked great (a reboot is necessary to get it working in all apps). The loading-cursor (as seen in opera), is even animated.

It wasn't too useful so I changed back to the transparent cursors, but with a BT mouse though it would be quite nice.

Well, one can hope that some stalwart 770 hacker will suddenly find him/herself with an unstoppable craving for a mouse on the 770 and help the rest of us out too. ;)

I did a fair amount of work on this for IT2005 and as mentioned, it was actually a deficiency in the X server. Everything seems configured for simultaneous stylus and mouse use (even in IT2006), but at least for IT2005 it didn't work at all. The X server only paid attention to input from the first input device specified -the stylus-, and specifying something else did nothing or made it crash. I narrowly escaped having to reflash a couple times because it would reboot automatically with a flawed configuration over and over again. I'll check it out when I have a moment and see if the X server will work this time around.

Larry

Wow, seems like this issue of getting a bluetooth mouse working is proving to be more trouble than it's worth. I would guess there would also need to be some code to switch between using the mouse back to using the touch screen without having to restart.

Try this: When it's implemented for IT2006, fire up the VNC server and use VNC on a desktop device to communicate with the 770. For certain tasks, like configuring the device or taking notes, a full size keyboard and a mouse is nice. You get a feel for it when you are using VNC.

I find that using my BT keyboard makes me want a mouse rather than a stylus.

-F

Yeah, I remember using VNC server and using the mouse to control the cursor. Let's hope we get VNC for 2006 OS soon to see if eveything works like before. I think that once we know that works it will just be a matter of some dedicated minds building a simple app to get direct input from mouse/keyboard working.

Well, if anyone ever does it it will be someone who is comfortable hacking Linux. I'm not sure I believe it is impossible to do on the 770 hardware, but I would believe it may require too much work or too big modifications to be practical. There are times though, as has been mentioned above, when having a mouse would be exceedingly nice.

http://www.mail-archive.com/maemo-de.../msg05044.html
http://thelemming.org.uk/maemo/btmice/

Hope someone finds it usefull :-)

Mouse Bounty?
 

The next most recent post links to a good how-to on hacking in the mouse. However, it would be nice to have something that is easy to enable/disable depending on whether you brought the mouse along or not.

That said, amongst all of the other features associated with this sort of thing, how receptive is everyone to setting up a bounty for the most desired features?

Clearly this device has potential beyond all it's peers in the handheld space (if you count Palm and PocketPC among peers,) and I know I'd like to engage brighter minds than my own on features which would be of significance.

Ideas?

Once those modifications are done (and they need to be done unfortunatly) then all mice will work with the device (although using a USB mouse would be quite sily :-) ) and the touch screen also works at the same time, you don't need to undo the modifications to get the touch screen back. All that is then needed is a gui wrapper for the 'hidd --connect' command and to switch the cursor theming on and off (but requires a reboot for them to appear :-( )

It would be quite nice to add that to http://770.fs-security.com/maemo-bt-plugin/ and I would be willing to do the work save for the fact that I no longer have access to a 770 since the work was done on a placement which has now ended :-(

Wouldn't have though it would be too difficult to do mind...

What sort of placement was it? Is there commercial development around the 770 other than Nokia's efforts?

- Bill

Re: Bluetooth mouse? Possible?
 

Hi,

where is the bluetooth mouse for the Nokia N770 or N800 and functions the Bluetooth driver
( http://770.fs-security.com/maemo-bt-plugin/ ) Yes or No ?

This Google Map - GPS application needs it - very fast

http://www.marengo-ltd.com/map/

Thanks in advance

Fidibus

Re: Bluetooth mouse? Possible?
 

You'd need to think of some way to make the pointer visible when the mouse is connected.

... And to make it invisible again when you go back to stylus. Because, and trust me on this, nothing is more annoying than having a mouse pointer popping up under your stylus.