How I got my Wacom Intuos2 to work ...

Hello all,

My first post to these forums to pass on my experience getting my Wacom tablet working in Mepis.

First off, I read the howto at http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/howto/main.

The first thing I checked was whether the necessary kernel modules were loaded. lsmod ahowed that wacom, and evdev were indeed loaded. Next, after more reading and messing about, I realised that most of the problems came from device conflicts.

X will not start without a "CorePointer" defined in the XF86Config-4 file, and the Wacom will be defined, according to the howto as "SendCoreEvents". This means that even if I don't want a mouse to be there physically, which I don't, I still have to have a mouse defined in the config file. So at least until I get the Wacom working, I'll need a mouse, and I only have a USB mouse ...

OK, so where does this get me?

From the howto, the first change that has to be made is here:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "USB Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"
EndSection

The critical line is 'Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"'. /dev/input/mice seems to mean something like "listen to all mouse and event devices." Nope ... that won't work, because the Wacom devices is on /dev/input/event. But which /dev/input/device is the mouse on?

To find that out, I needed xxd, which does not come with Mepis, and a search of the apt repository doesn't return any results. Hmmm ...

Google to the rescue. http://mandril.creatis.insa-lyon.fr/linux/freshmeat/xxd/xxd-V1.8-2.i386.rpm. I needed alien to install this rpm, so apt-get install alien sorted that out.

alien -i xxd-V1.8-2.i386.rpm intalled xxd for me.

So, in a terminal, change to /dev/input and run xxd mouse0. I wiggled the mouse. Did any hex appear on the screen? In my case, no. So I tried mouse1 and bingo.

Then I changed Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" to Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse1" in my XF86Config-4 file. Restarting X using resulted in a still working mouse.

What about the wacom tablet? Which device is it using? So I followed the same procedure to discover that, but with one caveat - I hadn't defined the tablet in the XF86Config-4 file, so I needed to do this from the command line. gets me there. After login:

Plug in Wacom.
In a terminal, run:
cd /dev/input
xxd event0, wiggle Wacom mouse or stylus, nothing
xxd event1, wiggle Wacom mouse or stylus, nothing, but using the keyboard fills the screen with hex
xxd event2, wiggle Wacom mouse or stylus, nothing, but moving the USB mouse generates the hex. Ah, interesting ...
xxd event3, wiggle Wacom mouse or stylus, success!

OK, so from the linuxwacom howto, I need to add some lines into XF86Config-4, and now that I knew which devices were which, I ended up with the following secions in the file:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "USB Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse1"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "cursor"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3"
Option "Type" "cursor"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "stylus"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "eraser"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3"
Option "Type" "eraser"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
#InputDevice "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
#InputDevice "tablet" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

Once I saved this, I hit to get back to X, and to restart the X server. I was happy as the proberbial pig in .... - I now had a working mouse and Wacom tablet. I ran the Gimp and set up the input devices in there, and lo and behold, pressure sensitivity was working as well.

So now I was most of the way there. The final thing was that I didn't want the mouse to be there at all, physically. Removing the mouse had no detrimental effect - the tablet still worked. Until a reboot, that is. With no mouse physically there, the device mappings had changed.

To sort this out, I went through the xxd procedure again, from the command line, to see what the device mappings were with no actual mouse connected. A quick edit of the XF86Config-4 file one last time, and a final reboot, and that was that.

So that's the saga. It took a while to find my way around the problems, so I hope this will help someone get there a bit quicker.

Cheers,

Mike.