So when they gave me the CS7004 course to teach in college this year, I went a little mad for an hour there, and after I got back up off the floor and cleaned the froth off the keyboard, it turned out I’d ordered this, Logitech’s top-of-the-line presenter remote/laser pointer gizmo. It arrived last Tuesday, just in time to not be around for the largest presentation I’ve done for a few years, but I’ve been using it since for lectures in CS7004. And I have to say, it’s very nice indeed.
A new toy arrived today – the VisTablet, which is just a rebadged Aiptek 600U (model number WCK-C121). They sell as Aiptek or Waltop or Medion or any one of a few other names for about €65 on ebay.ie at the moment, so I thought what the heck, I do a fair bit of stuff in Gimp so maybe it’s worth a look. A few clicks and a week or so later and it arrives. Cue tearing open the box and unwrapping!
Plugging it into the laptop (Thinkpad R61 running Debian Squeeze amd64) got an instant result in that it found the device and allowed cursor movement… but no actual buttons or pressure sensor stuff, so it couldn’t work as a tablet. So off to google we go and after trying some frustrating messing about with udev rules (to create /dev/apitektablet – which isn’t necessary it turns out) and hal fdi files (to set up X.org options, which are needed) and I’d advanced in a posterior direction.
By now we were through the phase where plugging in the device crashed X and had reached the phase where plugging the device out crashed X. At this point, I found that the problem lay in the wacom drivers. See, just because it’s aiptek hardware doesn’t mean the aiptek drivers actually work – in this case, the wacom driver works much better.
But, just to be annoying, the new version of the wacom driver doesn’t work because it picks up that it’s not a wacom device and commits seppku to avoid being of any use. Note to the coder who thought that was a good idea – go choke on a hairball please.
Solution? Go to linuxwacom and download the latest driver, then untar the tarball, go into linuxwacom-0.8.4-2/src/xdrv and edit wcmUSB.c. You’re looking for this line (it’s line 530 in version 0.8.4.2):
[cc escaped=”true” lang=”c”]/* vendor is wacom */
if (sID[1] == 0x056A)
{[/cc]
And you want to change it to this:
[cc escaped=”true” lang=”c”]/* vendor is wacom or waltop */
if (sID[1] == 0x056A || sID[1] == 0x172f)
{[/cc]
Now apt-get install xorg-dev and whatever other packages you need like build-essential and call configure and make and then sudo make install.
You now have a working wacom driver and if you copy the wacom.fdi file into /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ (it’s /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-linuxwacom.fdi on Debian) and add in the following bit:
[cc escaped=”true” lang=”xml”]
into the
Mind you… if this is what it takes to make cheap hardware work on linux, Linux Hater has a very good point.
So for the last few days I’ve been banging my head up against the same problem in the lab. We currently use Chillispot to run our access points for the Metakall user trials, which is grand, but it’s also fairly out of date – it hasn’t been actively developed on since 1997 – and it has some serious security issues. So with the new academic year looming, we’re moving over to its successor, Coova-Chilli.
Coova has a few neat features we like, and it’s also being actively maintained, which is important. So I took our testbed server, installed FreeRADIUS and MySQL and Apache and all the custom stuff we’ve written and generally got things set up, and then went to install the latest version of coova-chilli (1.0.14). There was an hour of swearing at iptables as usual (I really am coming to hate that program), and then I thought that’d be that.
But of course not. Continue reading →
Long time no type http://178.63.27.54:8080/statictangents/2020/07/11/long-time-no-type/
This is not even a little surprising, but it's getting exhausting.
A party running on the platform of "we won't do the right thing when it matters, but we promise that we will later, if you just hand us completely unearned power once again."
And people buying into it.
