I did a clean install of 3.8.30 and had a crack at compiling the silead module from GitHub - sigboe/gslX68X: Kernel space driver for Silead touch screen digitizers.
It compiled ok and installs. lsmod shows it installed, but no mention of loading the firmware and the touch does not work.
The module is about 20k in size, compared to 25k for the ubuntu module, so I'm guessing the source comes from somewhere else.