Busy, busy. Yes, my work has been using me up recently. A really good sign of too much stress at work is waking up at 3 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep because you are thinking about your task list at work.

Well, contrary to the optimistic prediction in my last installment, I may have to write a driver of some sort myself. Yikes!

What happened? Everyone is as busy as I am. And the guys working on the next version of XFree86 have been completely rewriting the input model for X. This means they aren't too interested in creating a module for the old version of X, since it probably won't work with their new input model.

Here is what I want to do:

There already exists a USB driver that talks to the Graphire and translates its information onto an input device.
There already exists an XFree86 module that can read from a serial Wacom Graphire.
I want to write a program with listens to the input device and emulates a serial port Graphire.

Here is what I am capable of doing:

Bit of a mismatch there at the moment.

Well, I have started trying anyway. I've begun converting xf86Wacom.c into a program which opens a serial device and simply reports to the screen on the data it finds there. This is solely a test program so that I don't have to bind my X pointer to the output of a program under development.

The reason I opted for this route is because I didn't want to write an X module. But I am finding that in order to get my test program working, I need to download a huge chunk of the X sources, just to get the defines that xf86Wacom.c uses. Yuck. I have MITophobia, the irrational fear of the X consortium. I don't want to dig into their source code.

So doing the dishes and the laundry are looking a lot more attractive and I haven't even begun thinking about the real program yet. I have a feeling that before this program is done, I will have turned my compost heap.