nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Wacom tablets have become the staple food product of any half decent designer or design house. For illustration they are second to non, and work well with both vector based and bitmap based software. For years, the wacom tablet was considered the tool of the Mac designer, and then started becoming more widely available on the PC market. Finally, in recent years it has become both installable and quite usable in the Linux world, with programs like Gimp and Inkscape.

Something happened though, in between Hardy and Intrepid, which made the whole process much easier, but also more prone to not working properly This guide should attempt to make it easy to install the tablet without trying anything fancy. It still requires manual steps and playing with the command line, but most people will have realized that that's just the way of the world with Linux sometimes. Finally I am also going to attempt to connect it to a olpc XO laptop, which should not be much more complicated than connecting to a regular laptop, though I'll leave that excercise for another day. I am talking about the Wacom Cintiq tablets here by the way, you know, the kind that has a LCD screen that you draw on, perfect for illustrating cartoons of faces and the like. And to be specific the instructions here are for the 12 " model with usb connectors to the computer.

If you are using Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, there is a bug that will cause freezes in the tablet, so download these community packages, instead of the ones from the repos, by putting their addresses in your browser:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wacom?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=xserver-xorg-input-wacom_0.8.1.6-1ubuntu2_i386.deb

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wacom?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wacom-tools_0.8.1.6-1ubuntu2_i386.deb

To make sure Hal doesn't automatically pick up your wacom cintiq tablet, remove the non working (at least for cintiqs) policy file:

sudo rm /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-wacom.fdi

Next we put in the relevant details in our xorg.conf including disabling hal hot-plugging (which does more harm than good for the cintiq while its being used.):

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "stylus"
  Option        "Device"       "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
  Option        "Type"          "stylus"
  Option        "USB"           "on"               # USB ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "eraser"
  Option        "Device"       "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
  Option        "Type"          "eraser"
  Option        "USB"           "on"               # USB ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "pad"
  Option        "Device"       "/dev/input/wacom"    # USB ONLY
  Option        "Type"          "pad"
  Option        "USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier       "Default Layout"
  Screen          "Default Screen"
  InputDevice   "stylus"   "SendCoreEvents"
  InputDevice   "eraser"  "SendCoreEvents"
  InputDevice   "pad"                      # For Intuos3/CintiqV5/Graphire4/Bamboo tablets
EndSection

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5