Monday, March 30, 2009

Wizardpen, Ubuntu 9.04 and Everchanging Xorg APIs

Here's the good news: I'm announcing that Wizardpen is compatible with Ubuntu 9.04! Apparently it was a quick fix actually as the reason the driver isn't compiling is due to the fact that Xorg had tinkered the argument list of one of its functions (specifically InitValuatorClassDeviceStruct, which it removed the motionProc argument). Doing so created a clean compile and a working driver.

However, the fact that all this while I was never involved in maintaining the driver nor had any knowledge in Xorg module programmer. Therefore it'd take me a while to test to make sure that there wouldn't be any side effects. But my guess is that I shouldn't take me more than a few days, so I think I'd be able to come up with a quick patch for that.

For now, I had the feeling that Xorg is starting to become more of a moving target seeing the API changing from time to time. With that in mind, I'm in an opinion that we'd probably need to catalogue the versions of Wizardpen drivers and to which release of Xorg it'll still work. From memory:
9.04 - 0.7.0-alpha2 (?)
8.10 - 0.6.0.2 to 0.7.0-alpha1
8.04 - 0.6.0.2
7.10 - Probably 0.5? Can't quite remember that one...

Would probably figure out a time to quickly sort it out, probably merging the new code over to project at Google Code or SourceForge. I'll see to it then.

P/S: For those who's confident in patching their own code, you can refer to this page.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

News?

Felix Leong said...

Hi Giorgio,

I had just released a new package (basically just 2 lines of code change) to make the driver compile in both Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04. Check it out.

Unknown said...

Well done. Thank you for your work.