Andy Chase

This last weekend was another adventure in "Configuring Linux The Hard Way", as I finally made a serious effort to get my Wacom Graphire USB tablet working under XWindows. (and subsequently, the GIMP)



It's not working yet, but I feel as though I'm getting pretty close. The problem is that there are about 5 different Wacom tablet HOWTO documents kicking around the internet, and all of them seem to be at least a year old, and all of them recommend using a different driver.



The Kernel stuff seems to be fairly consistent - I had to compile a few new things:

• Support for the usbdevfs in the kernel (I spent Friday evening trying to figure out why /proc/bus/usb was missing - this was why.)
• The evdev module
• The mousedev module

I already had the wacom module in place.



Next came the search for a workable X driver for the Graphire... I had no success with the older xf86Wacom and xf86WacomUSB drivers, so I decided to give the alternative xf86GraphireUSB driver a try. I tried a compiled binary first, without success - X successfully loaded the driver and initialized the stylus, eraser, and tablet mouse devices, but when I try to use the tablet the X log fills with lines and lines like:

Graphire: Huh? (2,0,-100)

You know you're in trouble when a Google search for a particular error like that only results in about 5 matches, and all of those matches are dead-end mailing list threads of other people asking

"What the hell does this mean? Anybody?"

I am encouraged, though, because those messages mean that X is getting some kind of response from the tablet, even if it's not the one it's expecting.



Before going to bed last night I copied the xf86GraphireUSB source into the X source tree and started recompiling everything from scratch.



The driver compiled correctly, but I'm getting the same errors. This morning before work I installed the xinput utility, which will hopefully help in the debugging process. I'll find out tonight.