Wacom board finally working in Ubuntu!

Posted by liquilife on 09/29 at 05:04 AM

Sometimes when I’m trying to achieve an elegant setup a simple elegant solution is needed. This is the case for getting my wacom board setup in Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. More on that in a moment. After upgrading my wife to a larger wacom board I inherited her old, smaller wacom board. At the time I just did not think that a wacom board would be useful to me but as it turns out I was very wrong. I write left handed and mouse with my right hand and this played into quite a sweet setup while on Windows XP and the wacom board. Having my keyboard armed with the wacom board to the left and the mouse to the right I was able to switch back and forth between mouse and wacom board quite easily in a very comfortable manner. I found that using a wacom board while using Macromedia.. err.. Adobe Fireworks worked beautifully. I also found that after a long day of mousing it was just simply comfortable to switch over to the stylus feel of the wacom board for a while.

After I made my recent switch over to Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake I quickly noticed that wacom support was not built in. Visiting wacom.com simply referred me to The Linux Wacom Project for assistance with getting the proper Linux drivers. I was immediately confused by this page. The “How to” and instructions made no sense to the new Ubuntu user such as myself. After some investigating over at the Ubuntu forums I was able to find my easy wacom board sulution to installing the wacom board. I am now, once again, a happy wacom board user!

Under Ubuntu Dapper, installing an USB Wacom tablet is straightforward. Remember to plug in your tablet before you boot; it makes things simpler.

With the version of the Linux Wacom driver (0.7.2) in Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake, if you unplug you tablet, it won’t function when you plug it back in and you will have to restart X. For this reason, it is best to leave the tablet plugged in. This limitation will be removed when the 0.7.4 version of the driver is included in Ubuntu.

1. Using Synaptic package manager1, check if the packages xserver-xorg-input-wacom and wacom-tools are already installed - if not install them. If you prefer using the command line, you can also execute :

    

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-wacom wacom-tools

2. Save a copy of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf :

    

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup

then edit it with the command line :

    

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and change all /dev/wacom occurences into /dev/input/wacom (created by wacom-tools udev scripts), then save the file.

You should be ready to go after you have restarted X. Remember to configure the “Extended input devices” in your graphics application, however you can already check if it’s working by moving your stylus on the tablet : the mouse cursor should go through the whole screen.

Posted by liquilife on 09/29 at 05:04 AM | 0 comments | Permalink
Tagged under: solution, configure, wacom, ubuntu

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