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.
• Since the PenTablet is not currently supported, it has not been decided exactly how application developers will add PenTablet support to their applications

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.