LinuxMusicians

I have a touchscreen coming soon and I was wondering what support there is in AVL MXE Linux? Or indeed, Linux in general.

Thanks

If it's a DisplayLink device (ie, both the touchscreen and video go over one USB cable), then you're probably going to have trouble.

If the video and touchscreen signals go over different cables, then things should be fine.

It has both options - USB-C only and the combo you mentioned.

I have an all-in-one Dell Inspiron with a touchscreen, and the touchscreen has worked out of the box on every distro I have run on it over the years, including AVL-MXE. I think touchscreen support is baked into the kernel.

milo wrote: touchscreen support is baked into the kernel.

It is if the touch device follows the Human Interface Device (HID) standard. Virtually all keyboards and mouse (including touchscreens do).

But DisplayLink is a proprietary protocol for transferring compressed video over a USB cable along with touchscreen data. It was created by a company that sells a chip which implements this protocol. They also make the Windows and OSX drivers for the chip. So if a company just wants to make a USB touchscreen, but not need to design all the hardware, and write drivers, they just license this chip from that manufacturer. Needless to say, the manufacturer does NOT publish the specs for their proprietary product. Someone reverse-engineered enough of the protocol to make a DisplayLink driver for Linux. But there are 2 problems:

1) It isn't a fully compatible/complete implementation. My experience with a number of DisplayLink devices by Lilliput, DoubleSight, and Mimo have shown the linux support to be unpredicatable at best. If the device works at all, the most common problem is that the mouse axis are reversed. So if you slide your finger up, the mouse cursor goes down. If you go left, it goes right. Etc. In other words, not practical to use.

2) There have been two versions of the DisplayLink protocol. The linux support seems to be limited to the older, first version chips. The newer chips are incompatible.

They provide a DisplayLink binary driver for Ubuntu here and notes on how to compile the opensource part for other distros:

https://www.synaptics.com/products/disp ... ads/ubuntu

I tried the ubuntu driver. Didn't work at all with my devices.