update on touchpad problems

[Bryan Berry]

sorry been out of contact on this issue and haven't responded earlier.

The monsoon started last week so there is a lot less dust at Bashuki
school. The touchpad problem has reduced to a point that about 3 out of
27 kids have touchpad problems at one time, down from 50%

I still need to test this problem out more thoroughly, but my higher
priority for Sulochan and I right now is getting an E-Library online w/
Nepali kids' literature. It should be live and Internet-accessible by
July 15th, will write later the tools we are using for it. 

thanks for the help guys and sorry didn't write back sooner. 

Bryan
OLE Nepal

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 23:57 -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> Dear devel@,
> 
> We can use Xkb/AccessX's "MouseKeys" accessibility feature to provide an
> easy work-around for many of our touchpad problems. MouseKeys is easy to
> enable through xmodmap where, (on a handy B4), you do something like:
> 
>   xmodmap -pke > old_map
>   xmodmap -e 'keycode 133 = Num_Lock Pointer_EnableKeys'
>   xmodmap -e 'keycode 111 = Up KP_Up'
>   xmodmap -e 'keycode 116 = Down KP_Down'
>   xmodmap -e 'keycode 113 = Left KP_Left'
>   xmodmap -e 'keycode 114 = Right KP_Right'
>   xmodmap -e 'keycode 36 = Return KP_Begin'
> 
> Your keycodes may vary; I figured out the right ones by using xev and
> pressing the appropriate buttons. I figured out the keysyms mainly by
> reading the xmodmap -pke output. (The Wiki scan codes diagram [1] and
> table [2] were not accurate for my machine according to xev.)
> 
>   [1]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Keyboard_layouts 
>   [2]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Scan_code_table
> 
> At any rate, after you perform this remapping, MouseKeys can be turned
> on by pressing 'Shift-LeftGrabby' and can be used by holding Shift and
> pressing arrow keys (or Shift-Enter to click). All this works great
> except for the fact that the resulting mouse motion is very slow (being
> capped at 30 px/sec in the default MouseKeys configuration.)
> 
> To address this, I wrote a small 'mkspeed' which is available in source
> form at
> 
>   http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/mkspeed
> 
> The relevant code is 
> 
>   http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/mstone/mkspeed;a=blob;f=mkspeed.c;hb=HEAD
> 
> Unfortunately, it doesn't work and I can't tell why. (This is my first
> Xkb program.) Consequently, help would be greatly appreciated. If you're
> interested, reference documentation is available [3]; see sections 4.5,
> 4.6, and 16.3.5 for the important details.
> 
>   [3]: http://www.xfree86.org/current/XKBproto.pdf
> 
> Alternately, if mkspeed proves to be difficult to complete, we can
> probably just raise the default speed limit in the Xkb implementation in
> the X server.
> 
> Michael
> 
> P.S. - If you know some nice Xkb folks who might like to help out, feel
> free to forward this email to them. Or tell me why I'm an idiot and why
> this is a terrible way to work around the jumpy touchpad bugs.
> 
> P.P.S. - Eben - you might start thinking about how we should actually be
> exposing this sort of feature in the UI.