Desktop or laptop testing: active with cursor

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 12 October 2011, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 11, 2011 13:04:44 todd rme wrote:
> > Is there a way to use a visible mouse cursor in plasma active?  I know
> > that it is designed to be used with touch devices, but having some way
> > (perhaps a keyboard shortcut) so desktop and laptop users can at least
> > boot up the livecd and see what everyone is talking about would be
> > nice (although it obviously won't give the real experience).  For
> > people without tablets on-hand, seeing what is possible might
> > encourage them to get one.
> 
> We only need the mouse cursor when a mouse is plugged in, right? Or am I
> missing cases here... ?
> 
> In that case, I'd suggest we do what we planned to do a while ago already,
> and switch on the cursor when a mouse is plugged in, and switch it off
> when the mouse is plugged out, that makes for natural behaviour to me...

iirc last time we tried was a bit tricky because often the drivers lied 
whether something was a mouse, a touchpad, a touchscreen or whatever?
what are the low level facilities to detect this? is it reliable enough?

another way that someone suggested me was something like this:
https://gitorious.org/cordia/hildon-
desktop/commit/f4116c14ed173a991f26ac2b8ca034b79db0437f

basically hides the mouse when touch events arrive, shows it when mouse events 
arrive, similar to what also windows8 does, in the end as behaviour would be 
the best, but...

besides becoming too much application specific, we again have the problem of 
drivers lying whether an even is mouse or touch (iirc on the suse image only 
mouse events arive atm, while on the meego image arrive both at the same time, 
and this makes the different behaviour on touch input that is easily 
osservable between the two)

Cheers,
Marco Martin