Scheduled Maintenance: We are aware of an issue with Google, AOL, and Yahoo services as email providers which are blocking new registrations. We are trying to fix the issue and we have several internal and external support tickets in process to resolve the issue. Please see: viewtopic.php?t=158230

 

 

 

Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

Graphical Environments, Managers, Multimedia & Desktop questions.
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
gurfle
Posts: 367
Joined: 2009-06-04 02:08
Location: Seattle, Washington, US

Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

#1 Post by gurfle »

This strikes me as a serious design flaw: Using the mouse control panel in mate settings causes simple touching of the touchscreen to behave like a right-handed mouse "right-click" (or "secondary click"), i.e. generally bringing up context menus rather than selecting something. Until I find a solution to the question on how to enable touchscreen secondary click action, as detailed here, my touchscreen is useless in the left-handed mate mouse setting.

As it is, this is really a crazy design: Touchscreens are physically essentially a one-button device (of course ignoring the coordinates of the "touch", which is irrelevant to this issue), and pressing that "one button" should always be the primary click, irrespective of the "handedness" setting of the mouse.

A work-around is possible by using xinput to toggle between right- and left-handed mouse, which leaves the touchscreen unaffected, but I think the current behavior of the mate settings daemon is very bad, and ought to be fixed. I suspect this is worthy of a bug report for mate developers, but am looking for feedback here before going there.

User avatar
debiman
Posts: 3063
Joined: 2013-03-12 07:18

Re: Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

#2 Post by debiman »

more trouble with your semi-tough book?
a conservative distro like debian does not cater much for touchscreens.
maybe (i hate to say this but there it is) you would be better off with ubuntu?

User avatar
gurfle
Posts: 367
Joined: 2009-06-04 02:08
Location: Seattle, Washington, US

Re: Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

#3 Post by gurfle »

Unless I am badly mistaken, the issue is in higher level software, i.e. display manager and desktop, which should not be hardware dependent.
But I understand your point, and perhaps newer versions of lightdm and mate will not mess up the touchscreen, which I can wait for in debian. I was just curious, more than anything, since I don't really care for the touchscreen anyway. I was in fact quite surprised that it worked at all straight from a clean default debian install.

In fact for the basics, the panasonic CF-54 otherwise works perfectly in debian 9.2 (only in 9.1 does the headset microphone jack not function).

So I am fine, do not care for the Ubuntu bleeding edge update approach, and the question was purely out of curiosity. If anyone else can tell if my "design" complaint makes sense as a lightdm or mate desktop issue, I'll look into filing a bug report in the appropriate place. Otherwise it's really not that important to me.

User avatar
debiman
Posts: 3063
Joined: 2013-03-12 07:18

Re: Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

#4 Post by debiman »

gurfle wrote:do not care for the Ubuntu bleeding edge update approach
i don't think ubuntu is "bleeding edge" - they do try to find a balance between a conservative "stable" approach and adding updates as soon as they seem "stable enough" (however they define that).
the outcome usually means better support for newer devices.

User avatar
gurfle
Posts: 367
Joined: 2009-06-04 02:08
Location: Seattle, Washington, US

Re: Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

#5 Post by gurfle »

OK, I overstated the Ubuntu approach. What I meant to convey was that I just prefer the more methodical way of debian testing, and do therefore generally stay away from the fanciest, newest hardware -- with this panasonic CF-54 being a bit of an exception. But as I said, all its basics are now very decently supported in stretch 9.2.

I am still curious about the unfortunate connection between mouse and touchscreen "handedness" settings, which really ought to *not* be connected. The issue seems (or ought to) to be independent of the hardware supporting drivers. Am I wrong there? We're just talking about keeping the click behavior of mouse buttons independent of touchscreen click behavior. Low level drivers should have nothing to do with that -- and if they do, it seems like we are dealing with an even more serious design problem!


User avatar
gurfle
Posts: 367
Joined: 2009-06-04 02:08
Location: Seattle, Washington, US

Re: Left-hand mouse setting messes up touchscreen in mate

#7 Post by gurfle »

The problem does not appear to be a low level driver issue, such as this deals with, and is certainly not related to calibration of the touchscreen.
gurfle wrote:A work-around is possible by using xinput to toggle between right- and left-handed mouse, which leaves the touchscreen unaffected
This turns out not to be effectively possible in mate after all, since doing so as a mate desktop startup (in a "Starup Application" script) sometimes unpredictably runs before the normal process that configures the mouse (as set in System -> Cnotrol Center -> Mouse), even if a 10 second sleep precedes the xinput command.

On the other hand, I was able to achieve the desired effect by using xinput to disable "Touch Gesture", which for now don't seem to work anyway on the Panasonic CF-54, as pointed out here. The touchscreen xinput settings are rather obscure to me, but at least this one was clear enough to get something that works, as a stopgap anyway. Here they are, in case anyone can suggest a better solution than what I did:

Code: Select all

xinput set-prop 12 304 0 #  Disable "Touch Gesture"
xinput list

Code: Select all

⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0	id=10	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0	id=11	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Wacom Co.,Ltd. MultiTouch Sensor Finger touch	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad              	id=14	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                            	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                               	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                            	id=8	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0	id=9	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=13	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Panasonic Laptop Support                	id=15	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0	id=16	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0	id=17	[slave  keyboard (3)]
xinput list-props 12 # After disabling "Touch Gesture"

Code: Select all

Device 'Wacom Co.,Ltd. MultiTouch Sensor Finger touch':
	Device Enabled (139):	1
	Coordinate Transformation Matrix (141):	1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
	Device Accel Profile (270):	0
	Device Accel Constant Deceleration (271):	1.000000
	Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (272):	1.000000
	Device Accel Velocity Scaling (273):	10.000000
	Device Node (262):	"/dev/input/event1"
	Wacom Tablet Area (296):	0, 0, 12372, 6960
	Wacom Rotation (297):	0
	Wacom Pressurecurve (298):	0, 0, 100, 100
	Wacom Serial IDs (299):	20504, 0, 3, 0, 0
	Wacom Serial ID binding (300):	0
	Wacom Pressure Threshold (301):	0
	Wacom Sample and Suppress (302):	2, 4
	Wacom Enable Touch (303):	1
	Wacom Enable Touch Gesture (304):	0
	Wacom Touch Gesture Parameters (305):	543, 241, 250
	Wacom Tool Type (306):	"TOUCH" (292)
	Wacom Button Actions (307):	"Wacom button action 0" (308), "Wacom button action 1" (309), "Wacom button action 2" (310)
	Wacom button action 0 (308):	1572865
	Wacom button action 1 (309):	1572866
	Wacom button action 2 (310):	1572867
	Device Product ID (263):	1386, 20504
	Wacom Debug Levels (311):	0, 0

Post Reply