Experimenting: Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch (CTH-460) on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic)

Updated 27/12/10: I’ve made another post about installing this tablet, this time under Maverick Meerkat 10.10 (which should also apply to 10.04 – I didn’t have 10.04 installed for very long!). The updated method is much easier as it no longer needs to be compiled by hand from the drivers as a developer has very kindly packaged up the required drivers. So if you are using 10.04 or later then have a look at that instead/as well.

(Original text:)

I’ve been after a graphics tablet for a while and chose the Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch based on good reviews, previous good experience with a Wacom tablet (Volito 2) and assurance from the interwebs that this tablet can be used successfully under Ubuntu!

As a Linux user it is often the case that supplied driver CDs that come with hardware only support Windows and sometimes Mac, resulting in a little more ‘fiddling’ to get the device to work under Linux. I’ve now got the Pen and Touch working so it is possible – as some of the guides on the internet contradict each other and contain different steps I had some difficulty initially but following this method allowed me to install and use it successfully including pressure sensitivity with the pen, and the touch navigation.

If you have found this page through a search then you could try following the steps below and if there are any further problems check sources such as the Ubuntu forums.

Conceptually the installation process consists of a few tasks:

1. Ensure system is up to date and install any packages needed to build and configure the drivers.
2. Download the latest version (I am using 0.8.6) of the linux wacom drivers.
3. Build the drivers.
4. Copy the required driver files (downloaded/built above) to their relevant directories so that Ubuntu can load them, optionally (but suggested) load the driver at boot each time.

It should be a similar process for any of the supported devices for the linuxwacom driver from sourceforge (the page gives details of all the supported devices).

Ensure system is up to date and install packages for building the drivers

This can be done through the command line or GUI as you prefer but broadly the aim is to install the packages we need to build the driver and ensure the system is up to date.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev libxi-dev x11proto-input-dev xserver-xorg-dev tk8.4-dev tcl8.4-dev libncurses5-dev

Also check if the packages wacom-tools and xserver-xorg-input-wacom are installed (in 9.10 they are installed by default, but if they aren’t or have somehow been uninstalled then reinstall them using the apt-get as above or by selecting those packages in the GUI)

Then ‘upgrade’ to update any packages that have been upgraded since last install. (In the Update Manager just ‘check’ for updates then ‘install’ if they are found)

sudo apt-get upgrade

Download and unzip the driver

I used the driver from The Linux Wacom Project on Sourceforge. Version 0.8.6 (which is the most recent non-dev version at the time of writing) worked successfully.

Download from the site or directly from its url: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/linuxwacom/linuxwacom-0.8.6.tar.bz2

Save to a known directory (specifically where you save it isn’t important, but ensure you know where it is – some browsers seem to dump downloads in a mysterious and obscure location by default!) Size is about 1 MB.

Unpack the downloaded file into a non-compressed version. It can be done in the Ubuntu GUI (right click > Extract Here) or command line:

tar xvjf linuxwacom-0.8.6.tar.bz2

Build the driver

We now need to build the driver from the file just downloaded. In terminal navigate to the unpacked directory (e.g. cd linuxwacom-0.8.6) then build the driver:

./configure –enable-wacom
make

Note that in the enable-wacom part above you should have 2 short dashes/hyphens before ‘enable’ (on some systems it may ‘autocorrect’ to the long dash which is not correct).

The process may take a little while to run but check it has completed successfully.

Copy the driver files to their correct location

From the current folder (the unpacked driver folder on Desktop or wherever it was downloaded to) we will then copy 3 files to their correct location in the system. They are the “kernel module” and config files. Check the locations shown below to ensure they are present in the current directory.

• Wacom kernel module: copy the file in the current folder /src/2.6.30/wacom.ko to the location: /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/tablet/   (The `uname -r` part will automatically substitute your linux kernel version which will differ depending on which kernel version you have)
• Configuration file for Xorg: copy the file /src/util/10-linuxwacom.fdi to the location: /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-linuxwacom.fdi
• Shared object file: copy the file /src/xdrv/wacom_drv.so to the location /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/wacom_drv.so

To make it so the driver is automatically loaded at boot, edit the file /etc/modules (e.g. gksudo gedit /etc/modules) and add in wacom (if it is not already there) like this (yours may look slightly different if any other modules are already listed – don’t delete anything – just add wacom to the list if it is not there already):

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with “#” are ignored.

lp
wacom

Then reboot with the tablet plugged in and it should be working!

To recognise the tablet without needing to reboot you could run the below. The effect of these is to restart HAL (to recognise the file loaded above), remove (rmmod) the wacom kernel module and re-add (modprobe) it.

sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart
sudo rmmod wacom
sudo modprobe wacom

The tablet should now be working as pen/touch (depending on what features your individual tablet has e.g. if you have the ‘Pen’ version then obviously touch will not work – the driver above works for many different wacom tablets). In software such as GIMP you will need to enable pressure sensitivity separately.

Enabling pressure sensitivity in GIMP (so you can assign different opacity to brushstroke depending on pressure, etc)

In GIMP open the menu Edit > Preferences and choose ‘Input Devices’ from the list, then ‘Configure extended input devices…’

You should have a window similar to the below. The ‘Device:’ drop down list will contain various different Wacom options (depending on the features of your specific tablet) relating to pen and/or touch.

From the drop down list select ‘Mode:’ = Screen, save and close.

To edit any of the config files directly to enable additional options a lot of good information can be found on the Ubuntu forums (though I also found that there was a lot of conflicting information!)

I’ve tested it using various graphics programs including GIMP and Inkscape, and as a replacement navigation for the mouse in general software applications such as OpenOffice and not really had any problems, the only problem I did have is sometimes GIMP seems to crash if the tablet is removed mid way through a session (it did this on both my laptop and netbook).

I am not sure if all this will work directly (ie without needing to follow all the steps above) in the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 as I don’t know what version of linuxwacom will come with that, though I’ve read some sites that say it should be working directly… we’ll see in a few days when I upgrade to lucid )

^^ Edited to add… the method isn’t exactly the same in Lucid, but has been documented as working – check the Ubuntu forum post on this here.