We are getting close to finishing the port of our SciTech Multi-
platform Graphics Library to Linux (free Open Source under our
modified mozilla PL). One thing has been bothering me for some time
is that Linux does not appear to have a *full* mouse driver built
into the kernel. There is the /dev/mouse device you can use to
communicate with the currently configured mouse, however this device
simply passes back the raw mouse protocol data and we need to know
about *all* the different types of mice that can be attached, and to
somehow figure out what one is actually connected.
This is a major pain, so I was wondering if there really was a real
mouse driver in the Linux kernel, or if people are interested in
building one? Specifically I want a device that maintains a queue of
events internally including mouse up, mouse down and mouse movement
events (including a 1ms time stamp for every event so we can tell how
far apart the events were). Then our MGL code will only need to
connect to the mouse device and read the events from the queue to get
the real data we need. Oh, and using the GPM libraries is not
suitable because GPM is not always installed, and this stuff should
really be in the kernel anyway.
Likewise another thing that bothers me is the keyboard driver we have
in the MGL. The MGL's event mechanism requires a keyboard driver that
allows us to get KEYUP, KEYDOWN and KEYREPEAT events along with a 1ms
time stamp for all key events. We also need to know the real scan
code of the keypress, along with the correct ASCII translation for
the key. Right now the kernel keyboard driver does not provide such
functionality, so we have to run the keyboard in RAW mode so we can
process the up/down events ourselves. This works fine (but we need a
separate thread processing input so we can get the time stamps),
however it also means we are not responsible for doing the scancode-
>ASCII translations. This is something we should not be doing in our
code, and once again something that should be handled in the kernel.
Comments?
Regards,
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| SciTech Software - Building Truly Plug'n'Play Software! |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Kendall Bennett | Email: KendallB@scitechsoft.com |
| Director of Engineering | Phone: (530) 894 8400 |
| SciTech Software, Inc. | Fax : (530) 894 9069 |
| 505 Wall Street | ftp : ftp.scitechsoft.com |
| Chico, CA 95928, USA | www : http://www.scitechsoft.com |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
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