395cf9691d
There are numerous broken references to Documentation files (in other Documentation files, in comments, etc.). These broken references are caused by typo's in the references, and by renames or removals of the Documentation files. Some broken references are simply odd. Fix these broken references, sometimes by dropping the irrelevant text they were part of. Signed-off-by: Paul Bolle <pebolle@tiscali.nl> Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
291 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
291 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
Linux Input drivers v1.0
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(c) 1999-2001 Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@ucw.cz>
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Sponsored by SuSE
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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0. Disclaimer
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
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under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
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Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
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any later version.
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This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
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WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
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or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
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more details.
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You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
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with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59
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Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
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Should you need to contact me, the author, you can do so either by e-mail
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- mail your message to <vojtech@ucw.cz>, or by paper mail: Vojtech Pavlik,
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Simunkova 1594, Prague 8, 182 00 Czech Republic
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For your convenience, the GNU General Public License version 2 is included
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in the package: See the file COPYING.
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1. Introduction
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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This is a collection of drivers that is designed to support all input
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devices under Linux. While it is currently used only on for USB input
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devices, future use (say 2.5/2.6) is expected to expand to replace
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most of the existing input system, which is why it lives in
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drivers/input/ instead of drivers/usb/.
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The centre of the input drivers is the input module, which must be
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loaded before any other of the input modules - it serves as a way of
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communication between two groups of modules:
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1.1 Device drivers
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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These modules talk to the hardware (for example via USB), and provide
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events (keystrokes, mouse movements) to the input module.
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1.2 Event handlers
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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These modules get events from input and pass them where needed via
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various interfaces - keystrokes to the kernel, mouse movements via a
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simulated PS/2 interface to GPM and X and so on.
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2. Simple Usage
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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For the most usual configuration, with one USB mouse and one USB keyboard,
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you'll have to load the following modules (or have them built in to the
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kernel):
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input
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mousedev
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keybdev
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usbcore
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uhci_hcd or ohci_hcd or ehci_hcd
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usbhid
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After this, the USB keyboard will work straight away, and the USB mouse
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will be available as a character device on major 13, minor 63:
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 63 Mar 28 22:45 mice
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This device has to be created.
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The commands to create it by hand are:
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cd /dev
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mkdir input
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mknod input/mice c 13 63
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After that you have to point GPM (the textmode mouse cut&paste tool) and
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XFree to this device to use it - GPM should be called like:
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gpm -t ps2 -m /dev/input/mice
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And in X:
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Section "Pointer"
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Protocol "ImPS/2"
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Device "/dev/input/mice"
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ZAxisMapping 4 5
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EndSection
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When you do all of the above, you can use your USB mouse and keyboard.
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3. Detailed Description
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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3.1 Device drivers
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Device drivers are the modules that generate events. The events are
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however not useful without being handled, so you also will need to use some
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of the modules from section 3.2.
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3.1.1 usbhid
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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usbhid is the largest and most complex driver of the whole suite. It
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handles all HID devices, and because there is a very wide variety of them,
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and because the USB HID specification isn't simple, it needs to be this big.
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Currently, it handles USB mice, joysticks, gamepads, steering wheels
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keyboards, trackballs and digitizers.
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However, USB uses HID also for monitor controls, speaker controls, UPSs,
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LCDs and many other purposes.
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The monitor and speaker controls should be easy to add to the hid/input
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interface, but for the UPSs and LCDs it doesn't make much sense. For this,
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the hiddev interface was designed. See Documentation/hid/hiddev.txt
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for more information about it.
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The usage of the usbhid module is very simple, it takes no parameters,
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detects everything automatically and when a HID device is inserted, it
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detects it appropriately.
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However, because the devices vary wildly, you might happen to have a
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device that doesn't work well. In that case #define DEBUG at the beginning
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of hid-core.c and send me the syslog traces.
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3.1.2 usbmouse
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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For embedded systems, for mice with broken HID descriptors and just any
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other use when the big usbhid wouldn't be a good choice, there is the
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usbmouse driver. It handles USB mice only. It uses a simpler HIDBP
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protocol. This also means the mice must support this simpler protocol. Not
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all do. If you don't have any strong reason to use this module, use usbhid
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instead.
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3.1.3 usbkbd
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Much like usbmouse, this module talks to keyboards with a simplified
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HIDBP protocol. It's smaller, but doesn't support any extra special keys.
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Use usbhid instead if there isn't any special reason to use this.
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3.1.4 wacom
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~~~~~~~~~~~
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This is a driver for Wacom Graphire and Intuos tablets. Not for Wacom
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PenPartner, that one is handled by the HID driver. Although the Intuos and
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Graphire tablets claim that they are HID tablets as well, they are not and
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thus need this specific driver.
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3.1.5 iforce
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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A driver for I-Force joysticks and wheels, both over USB and RS232.
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It includes ForceFeedback support now, even though Immersion
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Corp. considers the protocol a trade secret and won't disclose a word
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about it.
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3.2 Event handlers
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Event handlers distribute the events from the devices to userland and
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kernel, as needed.
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3.2.1 keybdev
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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keybdev is currently a rather ugly hack that translates the input
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events into architecture-specific keyboard raw mode (Xlated AT Set2 on
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x86), and passes them into the handle_scancode function of the
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keyboard.c module. This works well enough on all architectures that
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keybdev can generate rawmode on, other architectures can be added to
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it.
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The right way would be to pass the events to keyboard.c directly,
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best if keyboard.c would itself be an event handler. This is done in
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the input patch, available on the webpage mentioned below.
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3.2.2 mousedev
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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mousedev is also a hack to make programs that use mouse input
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work. It takes events from either mice or digitizers/tablets and makes
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a PS/2-style (a la /dev/psaux) mouse device available to the
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userland. Ideally, the programs could use a more reasonable interface,
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for example evdev
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Mousedev devices in /dev/input (as shown above) are:
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 32 Mar 28 22:45 mouse0
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 33 Mar 29 00:41 mouse1
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 34 Mar 29 00:41 mouse2
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 35 Apr 1 10:50 mouse3
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...
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...
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 62 Apr 1 10:50 mouse30
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 63 Apr 1 10:50 mice
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Each 'mouse' device is assigned to a single mouse or digitizer, except
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the last one - 'mice'. This single character device is shared by all
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mice and digitizers, and even if none are connected, the device is
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present. This is useful for hotplugging USB mice, so that programs
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can open the device even when no mice are present.
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CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_SCREEN_[XY] in the kernel configuration are
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the size of your screen (in pixels) in XFree86. This is needed if you
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want to use your digitizer in X, because its movement is sent to X
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via a virtual PS/2 mouse and thus needs to be scaled
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accordingly. These values won't be used if you use a mouse only.
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Mousedev will generate either PS/2, ImPS/2 (Microsoft IntelliMouse) or
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ExplorerPS/2 (IntelliMouse Explorer) protocols, depending on what the
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program reading the data wishes. You can set GPM and X to any of
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these. You'll need ImPS/2 if you want to make use of a wheel on a USB
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mouse and ExplorerPS/2 if you want to use extra (up to 5) buttons.
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3.2.3 joydev
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Joydev implements v0.x and v1.x Linux joystick api, much like
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drivers/char/joystick/joystick.c used to in earlier versions. See
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joystick-api.txt in the Documentation subdirectory for details. As
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soon as any joystick is connected, it can be accessed in /dev/input
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on:
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 0 Apr 1 10:50 js0
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 1 Apr 1 10:50 js1
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 2 Apr 1 10:50 js2
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 3 Apr 1 10:50 js3
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...
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And so on up to js31.
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3.2.4 evdev
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~~~~~~~~~~~
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evdev is the generic input event interface. It passes the events
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generated in the kernel straight to the program, with timestamps. The
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API is still evolving, but should be useable now. It's described in
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section 5.
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This should be the way for GPM and X to get keyboard and mouse
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events. It allows for multihead in X without any specific multihead
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kernel support. The event codes are the same on all architectures and
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are hardware independent.
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The devices are in /dev/input:
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 64 Apr 1 10:49 event0
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 65 Apr 1 10:50 event1
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 66 Apr 1 10:50 event2
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crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 67 Apr 1 10:50 event3
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...
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And so on up to event31.
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4. Verifying if it works
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Typing a couple keys on the keyboard should be enough to check that
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a USB keyboard works and is correctly connected to the kernel keyboard
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driver.
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Doing a cat /dev/input/mouse0 (c, 13, 32) will verify that a mouse
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is also emulated, characters should appear if you move it.
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You can test the joystick emulation with the 'jstest' utility,
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available in the joystick package (see Documentation/input/joystick.txt).
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You can test the event devices with the 'evtest' utility available
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in the LinuxConsole project CVS archive (see the URL below).
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5. Event interface
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Should you want to add event device support into any application (X, gpm,
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svgalib ...) I <vojtech@ucw.cz> will be happy to provide you any help I
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can. Here goes a description of the current state of things, which is going
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to be extended, but not changed incompatibly as time goes:
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You can use blocking and nonblocking reads, also select() on the
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/dev/input/eventX devices, and you'll always get a whole number of input
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events on a read. Their layout is:
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struct input_event {
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struct timeval time;
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unsigned short type;
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unsigned short code;
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unsigned int value;
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};
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'time' is the timestamp, it returns the time at which the event happened.
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Type is for example EV_REL for relative moment, EV_KEY for a keypress or
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release. More types are defined in include/linux/input.h.
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'code' is event code, for example REL_X or KEY_BACKSPACE, again a complete
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list is in include/linux/input.h.
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'value' is the value the event carries. Either a relative change for
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EV_REL, absolute new value for EV_ABS (joysticks ...), or 0 for EV_KEY for
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release, 1 for keypress and 2 for autorepeat.
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