BAMBOO FUN - Tablet

A bit unexpected I got the the teaching position for a course related to Computer Algebra Systems used on problems in structural mechanics. As it wasn't easy to find a lecture room in this short spell I only got one without a chalkboard. That was the inspiration to look after a graphics tablet - a tablet PC was a bit too expensive ;-) . More or less accidentally I found the BAMBOO FUN. The surprise was even bigger as I found out that it's really well supported in linux.

That's really no choke. The BAMBOO FUN works simply perfect in my environments. Here are the relevant sections in my xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
    [...]
        InputDevice    "stylus"    "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "eraser"    "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "stylus"
  Option        "Device"        "/dev/input/wacom"   # USB ONLY
  Option        "Type"          "stylus"
  Option        "USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
#  Option "Twinview" "horizontal"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "eraser"
  Option        "Device"        "/dev/input/wacom"   # USB ONLY
  Option        "Type"          "eraser"
  Option        "USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
#  Option "Twinview" "horizontal"
EndSection

All about the config options of the device can be found at http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/. I also recommend the usage of the provided (patched) kernel module which supports more devices then the one provided by the kernel.

The /dev/input/wacom device node is created by the default udev rules which comes with the x11-drivers/linuxwacom ebuild. I've edited the /etc/udev/rules.d/60-wacom.rules

[...]
# Convenience link for the common case of a single tablet.
KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="056a", SYMLINK="input/wacom", GROUP="users", MODE="0666"
[...]

to achieve read access to all users. This may or may not apply to your setup. At least you've to ensure that the user running X is able to read the device.

On Gentoo I had the problem that I've to compile the kernel module to compile the ebuild - but the ebuild does not overwrite the original kernel module and modprobe doesn't load the new but always the old one.

The ebuild module is in

/lib/modules/<kernel-version>/input/wacom.ko

and the kernel module in

/lib/modules/<kernel-version>/kernel/drivers/input/tablet/wacom.ko

The simplest hack is to copy the ebuild wacom.ko into the original dir. I am going to investigate the issue and I am pretty sure that it's going to be fixed soon :-) .

Here you can find an example document written with the tablet.

Edit: If you've asked yourself if it's possible to hotplug the bamboo -> Yes it is - more or less What you've to do is to chvt 1 and back to X then the input device should be active.