I Bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun Small Graphics Tablet a couple of days ago.
Wanting one for quite some time now, I decided to go and buy it on-line. And after 3 days, it came all the way from Germany .

I didnt even try running it on windows/mac before I plugged it into my ‘box running OpenSuse 11. First thing I notice: Its already working. Kindof.  It’s got relative tracking and the pad/buttons dont work.

How i got it running and some pics, after the jump.

http://picasaweb.google.com/rawdevelopement/Wacom

First of all, wacom packages were installed in opensuse by default, so not much action was needed there. I tried running the command line tool wacomcpl-exec to no avail. xsetwacom didn’t find anything. That only meant that the devices were not intialised properly in xorg.conf and i would have to find and set them myself.

After some poking around, I found wacdump ( included with wacom packages ) was the tool i needed. Since Bamboo Fun is a USB device, /dev/input/event* is where you will find it. Using wacdump i located it at /dev/input/event7. And then a quick look at http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/howto/inputdev to find out the proper way to configure xorg.

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "stylus"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event7"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "eraser"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event7"
Option "Type" "eraser"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "cursor"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event7"
Option "Type" "cursor"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "pad"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event7"
Option "Type" "pad"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection


Changing the “Device” appropriately. After a quick X restart (CTRL ALT BACKSPACE), everything started working. Then for the final touches, I used wacomcpl-exec, that recognised the devices now, to change the rotation of the wheelpad, the buttons and sentitivity etc. I tried Bamboo in Inkscape, where i only had to enable the device in Input Devices under File.

Debriefing:

Things not working:

• Custom shortcuts on buttons, trough you can set them but find you will only get nice shortcuts to crash X.
• WheelPad works but doesn’t support the tap up/down feature like it does on windows. (probably software based)

Things one would wish to work better:

• Configuration. Not just of xorg but the tablet itself needs to be configurable in a stable easy GUI way.

All in all, well worth the effort.

Tags: Peripherals, Tablet, Wacom