WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3.1

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matt
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WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3.1

Post by matt »


I've edited this message to provide a Step-by-Step install procedure for Puppy Linux 4.3.1. This is a DESTRUCTIVE install that will wipe all existing files on your WebDT.

1 ) Download the ISO for Puppy Linux 4.3.1 from puppylinux.org.I actually chose to install the "small" version from http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-4.3.1/special-puppies/pup-431-small.iso EDIT: I don't think the "small" version has the necessary drivers

2 ) Burn to CD and boot your WebDT with the CD. You'll need a USB hub so that you can attach a USB CD drive and keyboard+mouse.

If you don't have a USB CD ROM available, you can use a USB flash drive in a round-about-fashion. The way I achieved this was to install the syslinux bootloader on my USB flash drive following STEP 2 onwards of these instructions: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/all-in-one-usb-dsl/ This made my USB flash drive bootable. I was then able to extract the puppy.iso contents to my USB flash drive. If you do this on a Windows machine, you MUST read the "Warning to MS Windows Users" at this link: http://www.puppylinux.com/flash-puppy.htm. Finally, when you boot from this USB stick, syslinux won't find your kernel. You'll need to type: vmlinuz initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=usbflash


3 ) Answer the prompts regarding which keyboard and locale you want your Puppy to use (english, US, etc.). When it asks you whether you want to use Xorg or Xvesa for the video, choose "Xorg".

4 ) Choose 800x600 for the LCD panel size. And 800x600x16 for the video depth on the next screen.

5 ) Puppy should now boot for the first time. It may take about 5 minutes or so to get to a desktop.

6 ) Click the "Install" icon on the desktop. It's the fourth icon in the top row of icons.

7 ) Click the button marked "Universal Installer". This will launch an installation GUI.

8 ) At the media selection, choose "Internal IDE/SATA Flash drive (eg: CF card in IDE adaptor)".

9 ) A dialog box will confirm your drive selection as "sda - 500MiB". Choose OK.

10) Installer will now probe the drive and inform you which filesystems it found. If your drive is already formatted with the ext3 filesystem then it will read something like "sda1: ext3, size 494.2 MiB" at the top of the next dialog box. If this is not the case, you'll need to click the second button to launch the partition editor and reformat your drive as ext3 before proceeding to the next step.

11) Click the top button "Install Puppy to sda1".

12) Puppy will now confirm your intention to install. Press OK.

13) Bootloader selection. I chose the 3rd option "mbr.bin". Worked for me.

14) "Absolute Final Sanity Check". Press ENTER

15) Press any alphanumeric key to wipe the drive.

16) Press any alphanumeric key to confirm you want Puppy to run in RAM at boottime (faster).

17) Wait. It will copy the files. Takes less than 10 minutes.

18) Choose reboot from the bottom left menu. Don't bother with the 'save session' option.

19) Before your WebDT completes booting, disconnect the CD drive [or USB stick] so that the next boot will be from the internal drive.

20) Puppy will now boot. You should see 3 lines of text, the last one saying "copying to ram". Takes a few minutes.

21) Again you have to answer keyboard layout and locale questions. Last time, I promise!

22) You have now booted into Puppy from your internal drive. At this stage, however, puppy is still running in live CD mode. We need to make a few more adjustments....

23) Reboot. Yes - so soon! This is to prompt Puppy to ask us questions about session files...

24) Puppy now gives you choices about session files. The concept here is that puppy has run from a compressed image and wants to save your changes/sessions to compressed images called '2fs' files. I prefer NOT to do this, since puppy will want to pre-allocate all the remaining drive space. Instead - I chose the "SAVE TO sda1" option. EDIT: saving to '2fs' is actually the better option, since this allows easy backups, upgrades, and the possiblity of moving the compressed image to another drive (eg: the compact flash slot.... . hopefully)

25) Puppy now reboots, after telling you that it will create a 100MB swapfile called "pupswap.swp". You could probably risk deleting this later if you were desperate for more space... I haven't tried.

26) This time you'll get lots of warnings about "Calling INT 0x15 (F000:69DA) EAX is 0xBF01"... I don't know how to suppress this... Kind of annoying, since it happens every reboot... If anyone can help with this I would appreciate.

27) Cool! I just noticed that that puppy 4.3.1 has fixed a bug about the modules not being installed properly.... so we can skip step 27!

28) To get your wireless working, go to the 'start' menu (bottom left) and choose setup->network wizard. If you have the Cisco card then the airo_cs module will have already loaded... Other wireless cards work too under ndiswrapper.

29) Okay! That's puppy installed.... but now for the Penmount Touchscreen....

30) Download and extract the Penmount 9000 drivers for Ubuntu 7.10 from
http://www.penmount.com/down_2_1.php

31) Edit the 'install.sh' file and delete every occurence of "sudo -u root ", since puppy has no sudo command.

32) Open a terminal in the same folder as your penmount driver (right-click in the folder and choose Window->Terminal Here). Type

Code: Select all

./install.sh
This should copy all the driver files and ask you a series of questions about the Penmount 9000. I used defaults for all except 'beep'.

33) Reboot

34) Touchscreen should now work, but to calibrate you'll need to open a terminal and type

Code: Select all

./gCalib 25
35) If you find that the y-axis is inverted, you can fix this by adding this under the "InputDevice" section related to the penmount in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Code: Select all

Option "SwapY"  "1"
"SwapX" and "SwapXY" are also valid options.

36) At this stage, there are a whopping 243 Megabytes free on the drive! However, I chose to install a newer version of the SeaMonkey browser from http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47076 and install the grabanddrag plugin as per http://webdt.org/index.php?topic=312 This left me with 199 Megabytes free.

37) Finally, edit the 'extlinux.conf' file at the root of your drive by adding 'acpi=force' to the end. This enables the front panel buttons....

38) Front panel buttons can be key binded by editing the /root/.jwm/jwmrc-personal file on your install drive. The section entitled "Key bindings" allows you to link keycodes to actions... The keycodes for the WebDT are: 220 for the power button, 74 = Right, 73 = Left, 72 = Down, 71 = Up, and 67 - 70 for the front buttons. If you want to remap these buttons to mimick actual keyboard keys, then read this post: http://webdt.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9 Otherwise, if you just want the buttons to launch a particular action, then editing the jwmrc-personal file will suffice. An example entry that I added is:

Code: Select all

<Key keycode="222">exec:acpitool -s</Key>
This binds the power button to an acpi tool that I installed, and 'executes' the command to suspend-to-ram. Great!
Last edited by matt on Wed Oct 28, 2009 4:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by quotaholic »

Congrats on being the first to get Puppy and penmount working! I plan on giving it a try this evening.
b.1381
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by b.1381 »

1. What type of drive did you choose to install Puppy Linux to? 
2. Did you format the drive as fat32 or ext2?
3. Are you using grub on the MBR?

Thanks!
matt
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by matt »

b.1381 wrote: 1. What type of drive did you choose to install Puppy Linux to? 
2. Did you format the drive as fat32 or ext2?
3. Are you using grub on the MBR?

Thanks!

1. I installed Puppy from a Puppy USB stick to the internal IDE module inside the WebDT.
2. I formatted it as ext3
3. I think I'm using grub on the MBR. Or rather, I chose the 'grub from syslinux' option when installing Puppy.


The simplest way to generate a Puppy USB stick is by burning Puppy to CD on another computer,  and then using that same computer to boot the CD and install to USB. After that, you put the USB stick into the WebDT and continue from there.

A more complicated way (which I preferred - to save on blank CDs) is to install Damn Small Linux onto your USB stick (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/all-in-one-usb-dsl/) and then replace all the Damn Small Linux files with the Puppy files (by mounting the Puppy ISO on your desktop computer). If you do it this way then you are likely to get an error on boot where it can't find the linux kernel. If that happens, type the following at the prompt:

vmlinuz initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=usbflash

then you are good to go.


NB: I haven't tried an onscreen keyboard yet, but there is one available here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=249558
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by quotaholic »

Looking forward to this weekend when I can free up some time up to try puppy out. One question for you in the meantime, If you have a terminal open and you press any of the buttons on the DT do you see any terminal output? From what I am told the kernel needs the atlas acpi button controller module for the dpad and hard buttons to work.

Thanks in advance
quotaholic
matt
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by matt »

Sorry - no action in the terminal.

I went so far as to download 'xev' from this link:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=244431

But xev reports no action from the front buttons (or joypad) either.
matt
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by matt »

Actually - I've gotten the buttons to respond now.

I added 'acpi=force' to the kernel boot options in 'extlinux.conf'

Now, when I run 'xev' I get button codes 67, 68, 69, 70 from the front buttons. The D-pad gives 71, 72 (Up, Down) 73, 74 (Left, Right).


Good news?
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by quotaholic »

Thats exactly what I had to do on the DT 360 to "wake up" the atlas button controller. That is frigin awesome news. I was going to pass puppy over sice it didnt have working buttons however this news will force me to install it today.

Thanks for your findings!
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by plane_crazy »

Quota,

Hope you'll keep us informed. Looking for an image too!!

Bruce
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by serialjoepsycho »

anyone consider trying any of the developmental for puppy 5? I think the idea is to build puppy to work with the various package management systems. They have a upuptu on it's 8th alpha.
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by quotaholic »

Been through Matts instructions several times and no working touchscreen for me so far. Confused I am as to the touchscreen.pet as it deals with a 2.6.30 kernel and the kernel puppy 4.3 is running is not that current. Also after installing driver from penmount (one that does line up with the kernel) the xorg.conf file had no penmount mentions in it whatsoever. So I added the needed penmount xorg info and I still have nothing. The calibration utility came up but would not accept input. xev also indicated no input on the T/S. Matt can you provide a little better detail on your install? Our FAQ has some great examples on step to step instructions.

Thanks
quotaholic
matt
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by matt »

I have a suggestion that might fix your troubles. If this doesn't work for you then I will erase my install and start afresh, taking better notes.

I suspect that your puppy didn't install fully. It has this funny system of 'sfs' files that are meant to unpack themselves at boot time. Unfortunately, they only unpack when you run puppy in USB flash mode, not from a hard drive.

The symptom of this will be that your /lib/modules folder will be missing heaps of stuff. You can confirm this by opening a terminal and typing 'modprobe ndiswrapper'. This will generate an error if your install is not complete.


The background to this fix is from here: http://www.puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm

The fix;

1) Mount your root drive by clicking the icon at the bottom left of your desktop.

2) Find the 'pup-430.sfs' at the root of your drive. Click on it to mount it.

3) Right-click on the window that will open (the mounted pup-430.sfs file). Choose the option 'Option Terminal Window Here'.

4) Type these commands:

Code: Select all

cp -a --remove-destination ./* /mnt/sda1/

sync

Substitute '/mnt/sda1' for whatever your root drive is mounted as.


Hopefully that will fix your trouble, but let me know if not. I will make a full guide from go to whoa if required.
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by quotaholic »

Seriously appreciate your follow through Matt! That sounds very logical to me. In fact networking never did come up for me and I did install from an external CD-rom. So please let me thank you for your experience at this point.

This evening I will follow your instructions and check out the link you provided. I did make the "save" file exist on the hard drive and to fill all remaining space. By the looks of your instructions I may need to have some room to unpack the sfs file. Considering this I will reinstall and document the steps taken. Puppy is by far the fastest os yet on the DT and I am excited to use it.

Thanks again
quotaholic
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by quotaholic »

I am sure there are a number of things that I am doing incorrectly as Puppy is unfamiliar to me. When I click on the pup-430.sfs file a dialog pops up indicating that "pup-430.sfs" is already mounted and in use by puppy. Issuing the copy command resulted in a dialog indicating files were the same. When I tried to use gparted to format the internal flash the volume was in use by puppy and could not be unmounted.

SO I got out a debian 5 disc and formatted and then went back to puppy. I installed to HD repeated copy command with same results and rebooted after penmount setup completed. I saved to a 256 meg file this time in stead of "rest of drive" and still do not have any input on the touchscreen.

Matt, do you have any suggestions on what I can try from here?
matt
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Re: WORKING Penmount touchscreen on Puppy Linux 4.3

Post by matt »

Hmmm... Sorry that it hasn't gone smoothly for you. Any minor glitches in an install I tend to fix without really thinking about it, so I can't help you sorry.

I will refresh my install either tonight or tomorrow, make a better step-by-step, and upload a 'dd' disk image to make the process much easier. I've been wanting to play with the "Woof" puppy installation maker anyway, so strip back the programs to bare basics.


Watch this space.

:)
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