AW: What to do with a broken touchscreen?

[Helge Hafting]

Neil Jerram wrote:
> On 10 February 2010 11:57, Helge Hafting <helge.hafting at hist.no> wrote:
[...]
>> That did the trick! Thanks for the tip - an easy repair when
>> one knows.
> 
> Could you explain more, because I think I have this problem too.  How
> do you make a suitable glue strip, and how and where do you apply it?
> If you think it would help, could you take a photo?

The fix is easy. The "glue strip" is ordinary transparent tape. Any 
supermarket or office supply shop should have it. Get a roll of tape,
tear off a short strip, press it down on the bad part of the touchscreen
where it will stick. Then tear it slowly off again.

My touchscreen became "unstuck" at the first try. If yours doesn't,
try a few times more. Note that the dent in the screen does not go away, 
but the troublesome behaviour ends.



If you want to see what exactly the touchscreen is doing, then turn
on the X mouse cursor. Open /etc/X11/Xserver in an editor. Search for
GTA02. In that section, you'll find "-hide-cursor". Remove that word.
(You may want to make a copy of the original file first, so you can
restore normal behaviour later.)

Then restart X ( /etc/init.d/xserver-nodm restart)  or reboot.
if the cursor don't show up after that, start the terminal
app and click in the middle of the terminal. The cursor should show 
after that.

The visible mouse cursor should stay under your finger whenever
you press the screen. If you have a dented "bad spot" on the
screen, then the cursor will jump to that place all the time,
and cause fake mouseclicks there which can be extermely annoying.

Apparently, a dent in the screen compresses the touch-sensitive layer. 
Pulling out with some tape seems to fix that.

Helge Hafting