Pen Tablet Support

The XO-1 comes equipped with a unique dual-mode pointing device. It functions both as a conventional trackpad (the capactive-sensitive "Glide Sensor") and as a graphics tablet (the pressure-sensitive "Pen Tablet"). This page documents how the PenTablet is supported by the OLPC system software.

NOTE: As of Build 656 (2008-01-17), the system software does not contain support for the PenTablet.

For Application Developers

• The OLPC Human Interface Guidelines explain how the dual-purpose touchpad/PenTablet works from a user's point of view: see here.

For OLPC Core Developers

User Interaction

It has not yet been decided how the user interaction with the PenTablet will work. The issues are discussed here: PenTablet UI.

Driver issues

In March 2007, Zephaniah E. Hull posted an informative description of the low-level driver details here.

The PenTablet driver has disabled for quite some time (as of March 2008) because:

• the PenTablet is not currently being correctly identified as having capability "input.tablet" (see http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5268)
• apparently enabling this capability caused the problem of one button click being interpreted as two (see http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6079)

According to Andres Salomon ([1] and here), the touchpad driver has been completely rewritten in the master branch, so Update.1 will contain correct drivers for the touchpad and the PenTablet.