Wacom Tablet HOWTO: Requirements

3. Requirements

This chapter is about what is needed to get your tablet working.

3.1 Which Hardware is supported

First of all, you should have a tablet, of course. The following Wacom tablets are supported:

ArtZ II series (known in Europe as the UltraPad series - the same UltraPad name also was used for earlier tablets that only work partially.)
ArtPad II
PL300 (combined LCD screen and tablet)
Pen Partner
Graphire alias FAVO (mouse and pen, get at least the alpha 16 driver for full support from http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~flepied/projects/wacom/).
Intuos series (support may be only partial with the driver of your distribution, get updated alpha versions from Frederic Lepied's page: http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~flepied/projects/wacom/)

The older SD and HD series are not supported by the standard XFree86 driver, however, a modified driver that supports these devices as well some OEM products with embedded screens including the IBM Thinkpad 360 PE and Toshiba T200 is available from: http://hwr.nici.kun.nl/pen-computing/pen-computing-formats.html

USB-Devices
If ordering the wacom products intuos and graphire, you can choose between two different interfaces:
Serial and USB.

The Serial Interface

is available for a long time, so the drivers are more stable for it
can not supply power to the tablet. For graphire and small intuos, wacom made an interface wire that plugs between the ps/2 keyboard and the computer to grap that power. Bigger intuos tablets may use an AC-adapter.
does not require you to recompile the kernel or to load kernel modules.

The USB Interface

is newer, so the drivers may be still in development.
can supply power to the tablet, bigger intuos tablets nevertheless may use an AC-adapter.
may require you to recompile the kernel and / or to load kernel modules The section extra configuration steps later in this document tries to guide you through this process.

3.2 Which Software is needed

If you want support for the linux console, get the latest version of gpm from ftp://ftp.prosa.it/pub/gpm or from ftp://animal.unipv.it/pub/gpm (mirror)
If you want support for XFree86, use at least version 3.3.3.1 or get the latest from http://www.xfree.org

3.3 Which Software is supported

For the linux console, the only program I know is gpm.
For XFree, the keyword is XInput. This specification has to be supported by device drivers which provide extra information. In turn, XInput has to be understood by programs which want to use alternative pointer devices.

There is a big number of programs based on the gtk library. The gtk has XInput support and makes it very easy to use.
At least the following applications support XInput:

The Gimp - a powerful image manipulation program in the style of Photoshop. The 1.1.x instable development version includes XInput support as a standard feature. We are awaiting the next stable release, Version 1.2.x. Obtain Gimp from http://www.gimp.org , it really deserves it ! I am sure most of you know this and it was the reason to buy a tablet.
gsumi - a simple B/W drawing program that supports drawing / erasing with pressure and tilt sensitivity. Get it from the gsumi web page: http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gsumi/
xink (By Ralph Levien) - another rudimentary drawing program for X.
xink is available from: ftp://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/raph/xink.tar.gz
RasMol - a molecular visualization program that supports a hardware dial box using XInput. look at http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/distrib/rasman.htm .
xinput (by Frederic Lepied) - a very useful utility for configuring and testing XInput devices. xinput is available from: ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz

3.4 What has to be prepared if the Tablet connects to the USB-Port

USB-Support is done in the kernel. This means that you should be able to configure and recompile the kernel. If you do not know how, consult your local guru.

The Kernel

Make sure in the USB Support section of the kernel configuration you have the following set:


     --- USB Human Interface Devices (HID)
     <M>   USB Human Interface Device (full HID) support                     
     ...
     <M>   Wacom Intuos/Graphire tablet support

Now recompile the kernel, either load the wacom module (which would be in /lib/modules/<linux version>/kernel/drivers/usb/wacom.o), or reboot, and verify that the module was loaded:


     # grep -i wacom /var/log/boot.msg
     input0: Wacom Intuos 9x12 on usb1:2.0

On some system you may want to grep in /var/log/messages instead.

Note:
At least for the intuos series even the latest kernel (2.4.7 as of moment of writing) doesn't have the right Wacom USB driver, so you have to get the right one and recompile the stuff. See Semyon Sosin 's document for this.

I can not tell if wacom graphire works fine with the original driver. But take for sure that the shown __concepts__ will work for both wacom product lines.

Next Previous Contents