Fitting a touchscreen to the EeePC 701

I have an old netbook I acquired second-hand as a robot controller a couple of years ago - it's an EEE PC 701. I thought it might be a cool hack to fit a touchscreen to it, so I ordered a cheap resistive one from DealExtreme. A week and a half long boat trip from China later, it arrived last week.

Picture of what I got

It consists of a small USB hub with display controller (bottom of the picture) and what amounts to a glass plate with a ribbon connector.

Installing it turned out not to be all that much hassle - you have to remove six screws from the front of the LCD casing and pop the bezel off. This takes a little bit of effort with some sort of flat blunt tool, in my case a dinner knife -

Case reveals its secrets

then I slipped the touch panel in there and used sticky tape to secure it to the screen. It's hard to get good pictures, unfortunately, since I didn't take the bezel completely off.

Seated touchpanel

I unplugged the camera up at the top (it's horrible and I never use it), put that connector into the hub/controller's in port, put the ribbon connector into the display's connector, and that was it (let a veil be discreetly drawn over my first attempt, where I failed to distinguish 'USB IN' and 'USB 3' on the circuit board). The controller is tucked under the left speaker grille; it causes a slight bulge when the bezel is screwed back on, but I gather this is normal.

After some unsuccessful attempts with the Kubuntu 10.04 I had installed to get it to properly recognise the touchscreen, I decided to embrace the bleeding edge of technology and install Kubuntu 11.04 Beta - the world of touchscreen input advances swiftly in Linux these days. Unfortunately my display connector was mis-soldered (not an uncommon problem apparently) resulting in inversion of the X axis, but this proved easy to solve temporarily by messing around with the xinput command-line program. A bit more challenging was calibrating the thing - this is an eGalax USB-HID touchscreen, which the standard tslib/ts_calibrate stuff doesn't seem to want to talk to. I managed to hunt down this program, however, which did the trick nicely - it calibrated my screen, altered the running server's parameters on the fly, and gave me a configuration snippet to put in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d which worked just fine. Why it's not in Kubuntu's apt repository yet I'm not sure, it's pretty useful.

I also gave android-x86 Gingerbread a go from a live USB stick, just to see what would happen, but it didn't recognise the touchscreen at all. That might be something I have a go at fixing down the line, but I figured I'd done enough for now.

Still to do with this netbook, at some point, is taking the bottom half apart so I can try reseating the display connector; my screen sometimes goes all white and flickery, especially if there's a lot of black onscreen, which googling seems to indicate is a hardware problem. Also still to do is figuring out if I want to make and attach some kind of stylus holder.