Wacom Tablet

[Jakob Olson]

I am new on this list so maybe this information or even better
information may have been all ready posted.
If so, please forward that information (or point where i can find it in
mail archive) would be nice to see a official solution for this since
mine might not be the best. 

I have a wacom volito tablet that i was not surprised to see not working
right out of the box. (but i hoped since must other stuff really worked
out of the box)

when first booting up ubuntu with out any manual tweaking and trying the
tablet you will notice that you get some strange pointer movement in the
above right corner of the screen..and it stays there there jumping
around in the corner when you move around your pen on the tablet.

looking with lsmod you will find that all modules that are needed have
been load as should be.
that is hid, evdev and wacom.

after much testing i find out that if you first unloaded the wacom
module, then unloaded the evdev module and then loaded the wacom module
(and after that restarted the X-server) the tablet will work in X. you
will no longer get the strange jumping in the upper right corner of your
screen. your pointer will move around on the screen as you move your pen
on the tablet.

adding evdev to /etc/hotplug/blacklist will make this automatic (not
sure if this will brake something of your other devices that sends
events from buttons, like webcames, but most modules that needs evdev
will load, like wacom)

but still, the movement of the pointer on the screen wasn't smooth when
using the tablet. 

so what i did was to compile my own "official" ubuntu kernel with the
wacom.c/usbmouse.c/evdev.c replaced from linuxwacom-0.6.4.tar.gz
(http://linuxwacom.sf.net/)
not sure if all those files has to be replaced, probably only wacom.c 

anyway, now i get smooth movement in X.

most users of a tablet will probably also add some wacom related configs
in XF86Config-4 to get pressure sensitivity, support for stylus/eraser
and so on. for them i can be nice to add rules to udev to register wacom
tablets as /dev/input/wacom0 since wacom tablets tend to be register as
event0-3 depending in what order you connect stuff. by adding a special
rule for wacom-tablets they will get the same dev-node every time.
my udev.rules entry looks like this
BUS="usb" ,
SYSFS{manufacturer}="WACOM",SYSFS{product}="FT-0405-UV1.4-1",NAME="wacom0"

SYSFS{product} is only for volito, it is different for other wacom
models.

hope the ubuntu-dev-folks have a fix for this ready for the next
release.

this became a rather incoherent mail but any questions feel free to
contact me.

/hobbe