On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 03:09:34PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Both of your suggestions in the OS level help linuxwacom users, that
> is for sure.  My concern is how do we deal with a system with 2
> identical tablets.  I know users running 2 Cintiq 21 UX to gain full
> accuracy and flexibility. Right now, the system has trouble to tell
> which Cintiq is the first monitor when the system wakes up from a
> sleep or even a nap :).  Do you guys have any suggestion?

I thought we'd got stuck without a good answer to this previously.
The full thread is at:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=20060418020303.GA16999%40hank.shelbyville.oz

But the main bits of note to this question were me wondering:

 if there is a serial number or other unique id in the tablet that
 we can access, then we can always make a <TabletType>-<SerialNum>
 link or similar that people could use.

To which you confirmed:

 As a short reply to the following discussion, there is no tablet
 specific id to distinguish tablets of the same model and size.


So at this stage, the only method I'm aware of that we could use
to distinguish two identical devices reliably would be to use the
/dev/input/by-path links to differentiate them by the usb port
they are plugged into (since that's really the only thing the
machine can know about them that is different but potentially
stable).

They aren't the most user friendly invention in the world, and
will need to be configured for each individual user, but for a
static workstation where the tablets are plugged in once and
left that way, they should always give the same unique device
name for each tablet.  Its just a bit brittle if you start
moving things about and has a small initial hand-hack burden.


But I guess if we can't convince the hardware crew to add a unique
identifier of some sort to new tablets (and even if we could, that
doesn't help anyone today), then we'll just need to make the by-path
configuration more friendly to users somehow...

hmm.

We should be able to concoct a reasonable by-path rule specific
to wacom devices that auto-configuration tools can fairly easily
pattern match, but which will remain the same until the device
is moved to a different port...

It will probably depend on a relatively recent udev, but starting
from the set of rules I posted earlier, try something like:

----- psuedo patch ----
  # Convenience link for the common case of a single tablet.
  KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="056a", SYMLINK="input/wacom"

+ # You probably won't need this IMPORT rule, since an earlier file is
+ # likely to have already done it, but the rule that follows it does
+ # depend on that having happened to set ID_PATH.
+ # IMPORT{program}="path_id %p"
+
+ # Port specific link for users of multiple tablets of the same type.
+ KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="056a", ENV{ID_PATH}=="?*", 
SYMLINK+="input/by-path/$env{ID_PATH}-wacom"

  # Type-named links for multiple tablets.  If you want to use multiple
-----------------------

Here this gives me (for one tablet):
/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:02.0-usb-0:4:1.0-wacom -> ../event4
/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:02.1-usb-0:4:1.0-wacom -> ../event4

... when I plug it into two different usb ports.  Should work much
the same if you try it with two tablets.  If nobody here can get it
to wreck their system then I can include something like it for the
next upload.

It's not a great answer, but it adds a constant factor to the device
name that should survive a simple suspend or reboot reliably enough,
and lets people search for *-wacom instead of having to figure out
which *-event devices they want from that lot -- which is a bit more
friendly than having the entire name be like black magic to them...

If anyone can think of a better way to do this I'd love to hear it.

Cheers,
Ron



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