LG L1730SF touch screen display in Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy Heron, Part 1

A few years ago I bought a 17″ touch screen display device LG L1730SF. The product itself was nice, and very affordable at the time. However, it wasn’t easy at all to get it working with Ubuntu Linux 6.06 Dapper Drake. I wrote a somewhat detailed instructions about my setup and published them on these web pages. To my surprise, the article got many positive comments and questions even several years after. Apparently touch screens in Linux was a hot issue (at least to geeks like me) and there was not enough information available for troubleshooting.

In August 2008 I went through it all again after updating to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy Heron. However, this time I was better prepared, having a few years of experience on Ubuntu. This article brings the instructions more up-to-date and answers some questions I didn’t have a clue about at the first time. Although Hardy is already a year old and major computer manufacturers are publishing computers with built-in multi-touch capabilities almost daily, I still think these instructions should be valid for all DIY guys for a few years, since it is a long term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu.

Note: I have written this article 8 months later from my memos. It was not straightforward to get the touch feature working, thus some unnecessary adventures had to be made. However, I decided to include them all here so that others can learn from my mistakes. Moreover, with a complex issue like this I think it is better to elaborate too much than too little – you can easily skip the chapters you don’t care about. I have also tried to explain what I am trying to do and why at each step, as many Linux/Ubuntu newbies need these things to be explained so that they can learn (I went through that myself a few years ago). As a result, the article is quite long and you don’t actually need to perform all the steps that I describe. These steps are marked in the text.

Introduction

In this article I assume that you have already setup Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy Heron to your computer using keyboard, mouse and another display device. I will focus on explaining how to configure the system to operate with LG L1730SF display and its touch feature. Note that a keyboard and a mouse should be connected to the computer when you are going through the setup according to this guide. After you’re finished you can use the computer without them via the touch feature and virtual keyboard. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello World!

I have just switched from my old Drupal based blog to Wordpress. For keeping a simple blog Drupal turned out to be too complicated system.

However, the thing that eventually made me ditch it was the need for frequent manual updates due to security issues. I cannot understand  why a web service won’t update itself whenever a new release/patch becomes available. In Drupal community they give you the answer that it is insecure. Then how Windows and Linux desktops do this? And if I type the commands required for updating the site instead of an automated script, how does that increase security? I don’t read the code. It does not seem a technical but a human issue.

I decided to look around. After googling a bit, I learned that Wordpress supports some kind of one-click update. That’s the attitude I am looking for, so I decided to give it a try. So far (2 hours after installation!) I’m very satisfied. With Drupal I had to spend so much time for non-productive work, and this site is all about hobby projects. Now, with Wordpress, everything seems much more like it should be, and I can already feel that I can concentrate on the content from now on. Let’s see if that feeling lasts.

Already looking forward to get posting all the almost-finished articles…