Here are a couple of drivers I’ve been working on for the Cross iPen. The iPen is a long-discontinued drawing tablet that tries to act much like a pen, but which has a odd (and for the longest time proprietary) output format. My iPen languished in my office for about 4 years before Christopher Barrington-Leigh managed to get a specification for the output to me, at which point I picked it up off the floor, replaced the exploded AAAA battery with a new one, and started writing drivers.
I’ve written drivers for
gpm version 1.19.6
and for XFree86 3.3.6.
I’ve also hacked support into the
FreeBSD moused driver,
but that driver isn’t really good for handling tablets, so I’ve
not pursued it very far.
I’ve written:
=A test program=
This little program (which works under FreeBSD and [Linux]
(http://www.linux.org) with gl*bc) simply configures the
iPen and reports status changes on stdout.
=A GPM patch=
This patch adds iPen support to gpm 1.19.6. The iPen is not
well-suited to autodetection (because you have to do a funny
initialization sequence) so you have to explicitly set the
mouse type to ipen. This software is released both under
a BSD-style license and a stripped down version
of that license that should be compatable with the GPL.
=An Xinput driver=
This program, once you get it built, adds an XExtensionDevice
to your X server that lets you use the iPen as a mouse (and I
think also as a drawing device for the GIMP and other graphics
programs.) I’ve built it as a loadable module for X11, but I
think it will also work if you statically link it into the
server. It wasn’t easy for me to get this thing to build (I
had to manually hack the Makefile in
xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/common to build it, so
I’d be intensely thankful if someone could point me to a tutorial
on how to write Xinput modules without having to drag
the whole obnoxious X11R6 source distribution around after
it.
To build the iPen driver as part of the X server (for Xfree
3.3.6; I don't know what the build process is for Xfree 4 or
the Xopen offering), you need to
1. get a X source distribution and unpack it into **`$ROOT`**
(pick your **`$ROOT`**, but remember it.
2. copy `xf86iPen.c` to **`${ROOT}`**`/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/common`.
3. cd to **`${ROOT}`**`/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/common`.
4. edit the `Imakefile` (add `xf86iPen.c` to `XINPUT_DEV_SRCS`
and `xf86iPen.o` to `XINPUT_DEV_OBJS`)
5. run ``xmkmf'' (will build the makefile).
6. cd to **`$ROOT`**.
7. run ``make''.
All of this code is released under a BSD-style copyright, so you can do just about everything you want with it.