Tablet PC under ubuntu

[Loïc Martin]

Vincenzo Ciancia a écrit :
> Hi, as an user of a tablet pc under ubuntu, I have to say that this
> distribution can work very well with tablet pcs. Cellwriter and xournal
> are already there and they are very good. 
> 
> The only problem is that currently in both hardy and intrepid tablet
> activation requires manual intervention on the xorg.conf file. This is
> particularly bad as intrepid is supposed to hotplug devices, but for
> tablet pcs you never plug anything in, so I suppose this is the reason
> why I still have to manually edit xorg.conf.

It's not really because you use a tablet PC, plugging a tablet (for
example Inutos 3, Cintiq...) won't work in Intrepid either, I tested
that already. If I remember correctly, basically tablets were supported
in Feisty, dot.

Then support was removed without any warning for the users (what's the
use of a changelog?) which is very, very amateurish, and a slap in the
face to all the users that had put efforts in solving the bug for
Feisty. They could have been easily warned (if not offered a solution)
by reopening the bug in launchpad and dropping a short note.

Gutsy had the lines commented out, Hardy had nothing at all in xorg, and
the situation is the same with Intrepid. Hotplugging doesn't makes it
work magically, the distribution (or the user in the case of Ubuntu) has
to configure the devices.

> In the current situation it is unclear to me what should work and what
> not, and how input hotplugging is supposed to work, so I don't even know
> which bugs to report. The new X architecture constrained me to do
> guessworking on how the xorg.conf file is structured (keyboard and mouse
> are no longer there). Copying an old file from previous releases didn't
> well. 

It's the same for most (all?) users - since Hardy we haven't been able
to find much of a solution. The Linuxwacom documentation assumes you
have a traditionnal xorg.conf, which isn't the case anymore since 8.04.
Something must have changed, because copy/pasting doesn't work.

We (users) maintained a community documentation at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wacom , however since Hardy I can
confirm none of the steps advertised works anymore. Since we didn't find
a solution (except going back to Gutsy when using the tablet) that
doesn't require the user to download the drivers and recompile them, the
Hardy section isn't relevant. Same goes for Intrepid unless somebody
explains us in understandable terms what has changed between Gutsy and
Hardy (and Intrepid?).

The other pages I found for tablets in Ubuntu are in the same situation,
basically they're no use for an Hardy install from scratch.


Cheers,
Loïc