Mouse support in Maemo: Preliminary support - Page 13 - maemo.org

Thesandlord | # 121 | 2008-11-10, 23:23 | Report

qole, the mouse DOES work in the menu, but very poorly. The mouse pointer disappears, and you have to "focus" the menu first, so its useless but it works. At least it did before.

qole | # 122 | 2008-11-10, 23:36 | Report

Ok, since the original post won't get updated, and it's a pain to hunt back through this important thread for the details, yes an external mouse does work inside applications, but extremely poorly (to the point of unusability) on the hildon application menu (and perhaps other places).

The two most important posts are from jolouis. He packaged up Benson's scripts and made it easy to install mouse support. Here is the first post where he gives links to the important dbus-scripts .deb and the mouse support .deb, and here's the post with the updated mouse support .deb

DBUS-Scripts
dbus-scripts_1.0.3_armel.deb

Updated USB Mouse:
usbMouse_0.1.2_armel.deb

That should get you mouse support.

(Note, that this method lets you use the mouse in Easy Debian LXDE and other window managers, at the expense of some CPU usage overhead.)

Last edited by qole; 2008-11-11 at 05:34. Reason: updated

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Texrat | # 123 | 2008-11-11, 04:12 | Report

Originally Posted by migs View Post

Please keep us updated!!!

A mouse would be perfect for Nokia Tablets.

I realize it's an old post, but the irony made me grin.

migs | # 124 | 2008-11-11, 04:29 | Report

According to ITT's wiki page, http://www.internettablettalk.com/wi..._and_USB_mouse

Their seems to be a newer version by Jolouis : USB mouse 0.1.2 Not sure what the changes are but it works

http://www.electronicproductonline.c....1.2_armel.deb

I use it almost every day very usable but still needs some polishing...

Remember, sometimes to get it to work right, you start the mouse in the browser first, then restart the tablet for cursor to appear.

Last edited by migs; 2008-11-11 at 04:35.

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qole | # 125 | 2008-11-11, 05:48 | Report

Thanks migs, frustratingly searches for "usb mouse" lead to this thread instead of to the wiki article, so I wanted to get a summary that would help people get the stuff they needed. Your link to the wiki will help even more...

I am trying to use the mouse in Easy Debian, in LXDE. It mostly works, but there are two problems that make it unusable in practice. (1) The screen keeps dimming when typing or using the mouse, I have to keep tapping the screen, and (2) The mouse doesn't work for cut and paste, if I try to highlight a word with the mouse, it starts putting "qqqqqq" into the text.

Perhaps the first problem can be overcome by tracking down and installing "MoreDimmingOptions" mentioned elsewhere in the thread (and probably acMonitor too), but the second problem is really a dealbreaker. If I have to use the stylus to highlight words, there's no point in using the mouse at all.

Last edited by qole; 2008-11-11 at 09:41.

Thesandlord | # 126 | 2008-11-11, 05:50 | Report

More moredimmingoptions is GOOD. You can stop dimming for over 48 hours!

derhorst | # 127 | 2008-11-11, 08:59 | Report

The problem with mouse support is, that mouse movement in games is limited to a certain screen angle. If you want to turn all the way round in quake2 for example, you get stuck after a certain distance and can only turn in the opposite direction till it is stuck again. It's a pity. I wanted to mod a slide-on mini-trackball as a gaming controller sometime ago.

jolouis | # 128 | 2008-11-11, 13:49 | Report

As everyone's mentioned mouse support is, well, a rather nasty hack job at best (no offence to anyone of course the code that we have and the fact that it does anything at all is quite brilliant!) so there are some fundamental flaws that just can't be taken on without rebuilding things from much lower down. The problem with the task menu, for example, is that the mouse doesn't send pressure information to X, and the application menu for some reason is tied into that pressure information (I guess the idea at some point was to have a different menu show up if you used your finger instead of the stylus or something...); unfortunately there's no way to simulate this with a regular mouse. And I mean, I went as far as actually trying to build my own version of XTest that would feed default pressure information to the X server, which theoretically would have solved the problem... but it just got waaay to far over my head since Im not a veteran X maintainer or anything ;-)

There are numerous other problems that are caused by similarly unusual situations on the tablet. For example, the way that the current mouse support works means that when you click a button on the mouse it actually sends two almost simultaneous click commands on the X server; why two? who knows, but one didn't work and two seems to! But when you get into games and things that don't have Hildon's weird mouse features you suddenly end up with double clicks everywhere... etc etc etc.

The bottom line is that at the end of the day I relate mouse support to things like screen rotate or USB host mode: the community has proven that A) it's possible and B) people want it... now it's up to Nokia/the Maemo development community to listen to this and work to bring it into the next version of the OS (or at least make it easier to implement properly next time!).

Thanks,
-Rob

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elschemm | # 129 | 2009-06-08, 20:31 | Report

Originally Posted by qole View Post

Thanks migs, frustratingly searches for "usb mouse" lead to this thread instead of to the wiki article, so I wanted to get a summary that would help people get the stuff they needed. Your link to the wiki will help even more...

I am trying to use the mouse in Easy Debian, in LXDE. It mostly works, but there are two problems that make it unusable in practice. (1) The screen keeps dimming when typing or using the mouse, I have to keep tapping the screen, and (2) The mouse doesn't work for cut and paste, if I try to highlight a word with the mouse, it starts putting "qqqqqq" into the text.

I know this thread seems to be dead, but I thought I'd throw in that it's actually worse than qole reported. I just downloaded xmeacs into EasyDebian in order to do some project editing. Xemacs is totally unusable with a USB mouse because the 'q' dropping also occurs with middle clicks. Xemacs (under Linux) uses middle clicks to select directories/files in the file menu. So, you end up with 'q's embedded in your filenames, which makes the open/chdir fail.

Bummer.

JayOnThaBeat | # 130 | 2009-06-17, 20:56 | Report

Originally Posted by Benson View Post

Here's a script; plug the mouse in, run this:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
killall evrouter mouse_poll
rm /tmp/.evrouter\:0.0
for devfile in /dev/input/event*; do
  sudo /bin/chmod a+r $devfile
done 
mouse_poll `evrouter /dev/input/event* |head -6 | grep Mouse| cut -d: -f2`&
while [ "x`grep Mouse  /proc/bus/input/devices`" != x ]; do
  sleep 10
done
killall evrouter mouse_poll

It cleans things up, runs the mouse_poll and evrouter to transfer motion and clicks, respectively, and waits until the mouse is unplugged, then it exits. You could easily make it loop forever, restarting the programs when the mouse shows back up, but I'm leaving it manually started for the moment.

You'll need to add /bin/chmod a+r /dev/input/event* in sudoers, like:

Code:

user ALL = NOPASSWD: /bin/chmod a+r /dev/input/event*

You'll also need evrouter and mouse_poll themselves; source for both was linked early in this thread, but I'm going to attach binaries. ~~I don't know that they will work; they may need libraries not installed by default. If anyone gets them to work, please reply here.~~ They are reported to work, so have at it.

If you build from source, apt-get install:

gcc
make
libc-dev
libx11-dev
libxt-dev
libxtst-dev

Install the binaries somewhere on the path / make the path point to the binaries.

Making the cursor visible is easy; install an alternate theme, or use the fallback non-themed cursors by commenting the line in /home/user/.icons/default/index.theme:

Code:

[Icon Theme]
#Inherits=xcursor-transparent

Then reboot, for it to take effect.

@Benson (really, anybody who knows)

Using the Gaegle search (as I have named it

) I found a thread about gamepads that lead me to this post.

My question is, how does this need to be modified to work for a usb gamepad?

I just got my usb otg cable, and I'm hoping to be able to hook my gamepad up to my n810.

TIA

///EDIT

theres an attachment of EVROUTER in the original post fyi