HOW TO: Install a LinuxWacom Kernel Driver for Tablet PC's

[impact]

Both Gimp and Inkscape need to have the pressure sensitivity enabled in their own preferences (in the input devices section).

[ranpha]

Trying to follow this tutorial on a Fut. Siemens T4220 with wacom. And install the de wacom driver.

Placed "wacom" in /etc/modules and modinfo reports loaded.

However when i do dmesg | grep Wacom I only get this
[ 64.568421] wacom: v1.49:USB Wacom Graphire and Wacom Intuos tablet driver

I noticed that you only speak about USB and not serial wacom in tablets. I always used serial for my tablet pc.
Also ls -l /dev/input/by-path doesn't give me a clear view what my wacom tablet should be. I also experimented by removing the uncomments on Xorg for the stylus, touch, eraser etc but everytime my Xserver crashed nasty report it couldn't parsh the file. Any help in this ?

P.S. Shoudl i worry and get headache for this or just wait until 9.04 comes out and fixes the whole wacom stuff

[Favux]

Hi Afief.h,

Impact (thanks for pitching in!) is right, you need to enable it for different programs. To see your pressure curve look at .xinitrc in a text editor. It should look something like:

xsetwacom set stylus PressCurve "0 10 90 100"

Hi ranpha,

You caught me. I have a usb tablet pc, so it's what I know best. I've been reluctant to add serial tablet stuff in until I get feedback from a serial tablet owner. Since you have a serial tablet I think you'll want to look at the output of:

dmesg | grep ttyS

and

ls /dev/ttyS*

The information you're looking for should be in there. However, if you have setserial installed it might interfere with the dmesg command.

I hope you're right and 9.04 takes away all our HA's. By the way the wacom symlink approach seems more advanced for you serial tablet users than for us usb'ers.

[diego.souto]

Thanks a lot for your great tutorial.

I've got an tx2120es and ub8.10 with k2.6.27. I've followed the tutorial with latest stable version of linuxwacom with the following results:
- touch: ok... my finger is not very accurate but this is not a linux problem
- stylus: movement ok, middle button (for right click) ok, but it doesn't click.

I've tried several combinations of PressCurve, CursorProx and ClickForce but no success anyway.

Behaviour is like.... you can use pen on 1 or 1.5 cms from screen but when you touch screen with pen it seems loosing signal (no click and even movement control is lost).

I've been reading a lot of forum threads about tx2000 and tx2500 but it's strange... i coudn't find same problem on other people.

¿Any idea? I'm getting crazy with this

thanks to all and sorry for my poor english.

[Favux]

Hi diego.souto,

I don't blame you, it sounds frustrating. I have not heard of behavior like that.

Does the tablet work in Vista?

It sounds like the linuxwacom drivers are "working". Are you able to calibrate with "wacomcpl"? Do you see your stylus, eraser, and touch in wacomcpl? Do you have your .xinitrc starting with Sessions?

It almost sounds like it can't distinguish between stylus and touch.

Please attach you xorg.conf and .xinitrc on your next post.

[diego.souto]

Hi Favux:

First of all... thanks for your interest.

My tablet works perfectly with vista (at least the pen... you know there's no way that any computer could work perfectly with vista).

I'm not able to do nothing useful with wacomcpl because i can't do any click with the stylus... anyway... wacomcpl recognices the devices as expected).

I've tried other combinations... even to comment "touch" device leaving only the "stylus" but it's the same.

I leave you as attachment a text file with concrete info and configuration of my tablet. Please... check it. I include a lot of info from several commands and finally a game i was playing with xidump. It's fuc_ing incredible!

Thanks again.

diego

Hi diego.souto,

I don't blame you, it sounds frustrating. I have not heard of behavior like that.

Does the tablet work in Vista?

It sounds like the linuxwacom drivers are "working". Are you able to calibrate with "wacomcpl"? Do you see your stylus, eraser, and touch in wacomcpl? Do you have your .xinitrc starting with Sessions?

It almost sounds like it can't distinguish between stylus and touch.

Please attach you xorg.conf and .xinitrc on your next post.

[ranpha]

Hi Afief.h,

Impact (thanks for pitching in!) is right, you need to enable it for different programs. To see your pressure curve look at .xinitrc in a text editor. It should look something like:

xsetwacom set stylus PressCurve "0 10 90 100"

Hi ranpha,

You caught me. I have a usb tablet pc, so it's what I know best. I've been reluctant to add serial tablet stuff in until I get feedback from a serial tablet owner. Since you have a serial tablet I think you'll want to look at the output of:

dmesg | grep ttyS

and

ls /dev/ttyS*

The information you're looking for should be in there. However, if you have setserial installed it might interfere with the dmesg command.

I hope you're right and 9.04 takes away all our HA's. By the way the wacom symlink approach seems more advanced for you serial tablet users than for us usb'ers.

Well kinda already tried that. I know that my wacom is on /dev/ttyS0 but if I input that in my Xorg.conf nothing happends. Sometimes i wished i never install intrepid it broke the whole wacom part. BTW am using a Fujitsu Siemens T4220 lifebook.It's similair to a IBM/Lenevo X60 tablet so if ome user have experience with that,plz share

[Favux]

Hi diego.souto,

First I suggest downloading the TX2000 xorg.conf attached at the end of the HOW TO and comparing it to yours. I have taken the liberty of editing your xorg.conf.

A while ago LWP and Xorg. standardized the wacom tools names. By using a name like "stylusPen" rather than stylus you may be preventing things, like wacomcpl, from working correctly. I'm sorry, it is not clear to me if changing the names interferes with your game. Also are you running in a virtual machine? Is that what the other stuff is?

Also, think of eraser as an extension of stylus. They both use the same input path, and settings in stylus will apply to eraser. That is why I moved the eraser section under stylus. If you look at the back of your stylus you'll see that it depresses. So eraser is kind of a stylus button. It is using that signal to send the eraser event. Only some programs, like Gimp, can be configured to recognize the eraser signal.

Also I removed options from sections where I don't think they belong. The remaining options are in the sections where I think they apply.

With the edited xorg.conf now try wacomcpl and see if it works. You need to generate a .xinitrc as the HOW TO describes.

I have attached the edited xorg.conf and a sample .xinitrc.

[Favux]

Hi ranpha,

Sorry Intrepid broke your wacom. What I was suggesting at the end of the post was changing your xorg.conf input line from "/dev/ttyS0" to "/dev/input/wacom" and see if that got you a signal.

Without seeing the output of:

dmesg | grep ttyS
ls /dev/ttyS*

(remember setserial can interfere with dmesg) I can't offer much. I do have two "suggestions" other than the wacom one. Did your tablet require a line like:

/dev/ttyS0 port 0x03F8 irq 4 baud_base 38400

in your "/etc/setserial.conf"? If so have you checked it?

Also do you know how to use xxd? xxd will exit for devices not listed, otherwise CTRL and C to quit. Run through each device listed by "ls /dev/ttyS*" eg. ttyS0, ttyS1, etc. Bring the pen to the screen an move it around. You know you have the right ttyS* when you see a reaction with an output of characters. That's the ttyS* you want to use in xorg.conf. In a terminal type:

xxd /dev/ttyS0

changing to S1, etc.

I hope this is useful. There are plenty of threads and HOW TO's for the X60, so there's hope. (BTW, did you have to quote the whole post?)

Also seeing your xorg.conf might be helpful. If you'd like to, please attach.

[diego.souto]

Ok Favux... I was trying what you suggested me... let's see:

* STEP 1: I've changed xorg.conf and .xinitrc with your values (obviously then restart) --> Same behaviour

* STEP 2: wacomcpl... I see this devices: stylus, touch, eraser, touch (yes... touch two times... why? I don't know). I tried to do "Calibration" for stylus... buy obviously i can't do click so i used the trick of the finger between the pen and the screen... and wacomcpl wrote the .xinitrc I attach you. Then I restarted and.... same behaviour... no change at all.

On the other hand... there're are some extrange things I'd wish comment with you... maybe they're not important but maybe give you a clue of what's happening:
* Is it normal I see touch device two times in wacomcpl's devices list?
* Is it normal this errno=16 in XOrg.0.log? (see attached file)
* Is it normal to have all that devices in "xsetpointer -l" (see attached file)? Note that seems to be the ones configured in xorg.conf plus two devices named "Wacom ISDv4 93".


And... completing some info you requested me:
* I'm not running ubuntu on a virtual machine... i have an grub multiboot instalation (ubuntu + vista). But... if you're interested in... before I decided to install ubuntu on the machine... I've tried it first on a virtualbox inside vista... and in this virtualbox ubuntu pen works ok (only after guest additions installed). It seems that in that case is vista who is controlling pen device and giving it to ubuntu just like a "virtual generic pointer device".

* About names of devices.... I had tried first with standard names... but when I saw touch device two times on wacomcpl... i've tried to rename devices thinking maybe about a device's name conflict. But anyhow you can see that it's the same result with standard or non-standard names.

* The mess of commented devices and options in my xorg.conf is only the result of a lot of tries with different combinations. When you try all sort of normal things... and keeps not working... you start to try extrange things. So... yes.... I had tried earlier with the "how to"'s xorg.conf as is.

* I had also tried changing USB=on option and putting ISDv4 but the same result.


I'm really desperated. There must be some misconfiguration in my system.... browsing I see there's a lot of people who has this tablet and nobody seems to have this problem. Ok... Favux... sorry for my complaints... and THANKS A LOT for your kindly help.

diego.

Hi diego.souto,

First I suggest downloading the TX2000 xorg.conf attached at the end of the HOW TO and comparing it to yours. I have taken the liberty of editing your xorg.conf.

A while ago LWP and Xorg. standardized the wacom tools names. By using a name like "stylusPen" rather than stylus you may be preventing things, like wacomcpl, from working correctly. I'm sorry, it is not clear to me if changing the names interferes with your game. Also are you running in a virtual machine? Is that what the other stuff is?

Also, think of eraser as an extension of stylus. They both use the same input path, and settings in stylus will apply to eraser. That is why I moved the eraser section under stylus. If you look at the back of your stylus you'll see that it depresses. So eraser is kind of a stylus button. It is using that signal to send the eraser event. Only some programs, like Gimp, can be configured to recognize the eraser signal.

Also I removed options from sections where I don't think they belong. The remaining options are in the sections where I think they apply.

With the edited xorg.conf now try wacomcpl and see if it works. You need to generate a .xinitrc as the HOW TO describes.

I have attached the edited xorg.conf and a sample .xinitrc.