I am trying to get the stylus working properly on a One Netbook One Mix 3s tiny laptop.
This laptop is compatible with microsoft pens (I.e. it's using n-trig technology) but as far as I can tell the touchscreen is not actually made by Wacom.
On the newest Ubuntu version (19.0?) the touchscreen and stylus is not supported at all. In other versions of the distribution (for example 18.04.3 LTS) the touchscreen works great, but the stylus is detected as "clicking" as in it's as if you are holding the mouse button down when it is anywhere in the vicinity of the screen.
The output of xinput list looks like this:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Mouse id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ GXTP7386:00 27C6:0113 UNKNOWN id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ GXTP7386:00 27C6:0113 id=15 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Wireless Radio Control id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Consumer Control id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ GXTP7386:00 27C6:0113 Keyboard id=17 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=18 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD System Control id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
On 18.04.3. Notice that one of the devices is called UNKNOWN. Also the device with a similar name, at id 15, I know for a fact is the touchscreen. So I am pretty sure the UNKNOWN one is supposed to be the pen.
A different computer made by the same company (the 2s) had a similar problem with the pen not working. It was solved by Adya on github who released a custom kernel module: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=242893
This is the same behavior except on that computer, the pen didn t show up at all on xinput list. The fact that there is this UNKNOWN device makes me think the problem is a little different. Furthermore, some people on forums claimed that the pen worked well with KDE neon. I tested it and it wasn't detected at all. Perhaps because KDE neon is on a different version. Anyway, it seems like a shame if the newer version of Ubuntu is less compatible than the older one. I will try 18.04.2 and see if the pen support is different there.
Can anyone tell me what the differences are between the different Ubuntu releases? Is there any hope of fixing these issues and getting it running well on all future releases any time soon?
Update: Sure enough on Ubuntu 18.04.2, the stylus is working. xinput list gives the same except where there is UNKNOWN we have "Pen pen(0)". Will all the future Ubuntu releases not support this touchscreen? Can we just take some kinds of settings from somewhere and put them in the new versions?
Update to update: after installing Ubuntu 18.04.2 the pen is again set to UNKNOWN in xinput. It is still detected but behaves badly (always clicking). I have confirmed that id 16 is the pen using libinput
Edit: In Xournalpp, under devices, GXTP7386:00 Pen pen(0) DOES show up. That means somewhere this computer knows there's a pen... but xinput doesn't know where it is...
Edit: I followed these steps: (sort of) https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=312005&p=1762496#p1762496
Effect: xinput now calls GXTP7386:00 "touch" and the line with UNKNOWN disappears. The pen is no longer detected at all. <--- I don't think this has much to do with it because the config files in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ look exactly the same on 18.04.2 and newer kernels.
Possibly relevant note: Behavior is the same on the newest Fedora release which apparently uses Wayland. So the problem must be something totally not related to "compositors" not that I know anything about that.
As requested here is lsusb output:
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 8087:0a2a Intel Corp.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 258a:0021
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
another comment: I am aware that this is kernel issue. I.e. the kernel does not support the devices. What I am asking is, what can we do to add/improve this support? And also, why not? Clearly the linux kernel supports other N-trig devices such as the Microsoft surface pro etc.
