Hi guys,
I was looking for advice on whom to contact regarding possibly
integrating the waltop and wacom drivers of both the linuxwacom and
the xf86-input-wacom
(http://people.freedesktop.org/~whot/xf86-input-wacom/) drivers,
which, as I understand, is either related to or takes code from
linuxwacom, and I was directed here.

The short story:
There exists another vendor that creates USB tablet devices that
/apparently/ uses the same interface as Wacom. The vendor's name is
Waltop, and it appears that the only thing that's really holding the
linuxwacom driver from running both wacom and waltop devices is a
"vendor check" condition in wcmUSB.c. I think we could change those
lines to accept both the wacom vendor ID (0x056a) and the waltop
vendor ID (0x172f). It (probably?) wouldn't break anything and it
would make a lot of people happy :D

The long story:
Waltop devices are often rebranded by other vendors such as Aiptek,
CDR-King, etc. I have one such Waltop tablet, branded as CDR-king. Up
until recently, they didn't have an official Linux driver. They now
do.

Here's a link to their drivers page:
http://www.waltop.com.tw/download.asp?lv=0&id=2

If you download the Linux driver, you might notice something funny
that end-users of some Linux distributions have noticed too:
apparently, waltop tablets run using the linuxwacom driver.
Supposedly, the main difference between their "linuxwaltop" driver and
the linuxwacom driver of the same version (apparently), is that a line
in wcmUSB.c that verifies the vendor id to be wacom (0x056a) is
swapped out for the waltop vendor ID (0x172f). (DISCLAIMER: I'm not a
kernel/xorg developer so I can't actually read the code)

Advice for swapping out the vendor ID in the driver can be found if
you're a frustrated waltop user and look hard enough on the internet:

Arch wiki pointer explaining waltop with wacom:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wacom_Tablet#WALTOP_tablet_support_by_the_Wacom_drivers

Ubuntu forum pointer (long thread) explaining some black magic for end
users to try:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1261407&highlight=waltop&page=10

I'm a gentoo user, so I request on my distro trying to integrate the
ubuntu patches above. It "works for me", but I don't really understand
everything I did:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298579
(note: the patches I applied also disables another serial check that I
don't really understand, some review is probably in order)

I've also noticed about 4 emails on the linuxwacom lists asking about
integrating Waltop devices (they're identified as Aipteks on the
lists) into the wacom drivers. I think they were either ignored or
forgotten because the developers probably don't have waltop devices
and so can't devote time/effort to supporting them.

/However/, since it turns out that Waltop is using the linuxwacom
drivers officially for their products anyways, maybe it won't cause
any major harm to include their vendor ID in the vendor check lines.

Attached is the diff of the wcmUSB.c of linuxwaltop and linuxwacom of
the closest version number. There are some other differences besides
the one I mentioned. I don't understand them, but I think that
1) they're likely trivial or "extra features" people can live without
since my waltop device is working a-okay OR
2) they're possibly caused by the version number skew between 0.8.4 and 0.8.4-4

What do you think guys? Can it work out? :D
--
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Attachment: linuxwaltop-0.8.4--vs--linuxwacom-0.8.4-4.diff
Description: plain/text

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