Wacom Serial Tablet?

techiem2 · Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2005 4:07 am Post subject: Wacom Serial Tablet?

I have an old Wacom Graphire Serial Tablet I pulled out the other day.
I would like to get it working so I don't have to buy a new one (assuming I can find the pen to this one...).
So far I haven't had any success.
I know the tablet still works, because I installed it in XP (hehe) and it worked fine.
But I can't get either of my gentoo installs to see it (one being on the same machine as the XP install).

I emerged linuxwacom.
Wacdump won't even see the tablet.

buffalo · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2004 Posts: 70 Location: france

I never used a graphic tablet, but it seems to me that I have een something in the kernel config concerning Wacom tablet support. maybe you should enable it...
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techiem2 · Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2005 12:47 pm Post subject:

I did.
Though I believe that option is actually for the USB tablets.
I even tried hooking up my USB to Serial adapter and hooking the tablet up to that, but just got the same result.

I'm thinking maybe I just need to go ahead and get a new USB model.
I can always give this one to one of my siblings who still use winders since it works fine there.

Mark II

techiem2 · Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 1:23 pm Post subject:

The only thing I can think of at this point is that it has something to do with the serial port handling since the tablet works fine in windows but will not respond at all in linux.
I've compiled every kernel module I could find that looked like it might have something to do with serial port handling, but nothing helped.

Any more ideas?

Thanks.

mamash · n00b Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 7

Hi,

I have probably the same device (i.e. the first Graphire ever) and the same behavior: wacdump doesn't work. The X-based tools like xidump, xsetwacom work, however. So basically, forget about kernel options, just follow emerge linuxwacom against xorg (built with SDK use flag). These are the relevant sections of my xorg.conf, which work:

techiem2 · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2005 5:55 pm Post subject:

I gave up on the serial tab since I couldn't find the pen.
I picked up a new USB one and it connected quite easily.

As to the other problems:
1. For scrolling, my wheel is doing odd things.
Like the window looks like it's scrolling but doesn't.
But that's just from a quick test now.
I don't use the mouse since I have a nice wireless already.

2. If by picked up you mean like drawing in gimp, I have that problem.
It's supposed to read as movement slightly above the surface so you can pick up the mouse slightly and move it around and then touch again to draw (I think. This is the normal behavior in windows if I remember right.).
However, mine does not just move when off the tablet slightly. It still registers as drawing, which it should NOT do. I do not have this problem in windows.

Oddly, this does not seem to be a common problem. I have tried recompiling gtk (both versions) and gimp and nothing worked for me.
Interestingly enough, when I compiled gtk by hand from the downloaded source and compiled the xinput test prog, it worked fine.
Which would seem to indicate either one of the patches or something else different when portage compiled it is the problem.

mamash · n00b Joined: 06 May 2004 Posts: 7

Ah, I was specifically interested in your issues with the serial one, because I couldn't find virtually anything anywhere about it. And I don't have the issues you have. My wheel scrolling works fine except for the fact that the UP movement always generates 3 events instead of one (it didn't in Windows), and the mouse movement (just movement) is registered even a centimeter above the surface, while in Windows the mouse had to be dead on surface to be actually regarded as "in range".

techiem2 · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2005 6:36 pm Post subject:

Ah.

Maybe I'll pull out the serial tab again and try to hook it up to my laptop again.
If I can remember where I put the thing last....

elsenator · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 89

I've been trying to get my Serial Wacom Penpartnet tablet to work for ages now, but after emerging linuxwacom wacdump just sits there. No output whatsoever no matter what serial port i connect it to.

I also tried doing "cat /dev/ttyS0" and this generates no output whatsoever when i move the pen around on the tablet. Shouldn't there be some sort of output? I've also tried this with both ttyS0 and ttyS1 and also switching the ports physically. No result - just nothing!

I thought that maybe my serial ports haven't been enabled in the kernel, but i've enabled everything that even has the word serial support something in it. But they really do seem dead. Sadly i don't have any other serial based hardware i can test them with.

Any suggestions?

I'm running Gentoo-dev-source-r6

techiem2 · Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 5:21 pm Post subject:

I think that's what was happening to me too.
I never did figure out why it wouldn't register.

TechieM2

elsenator · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 89