Arch Linux

pedepy

Member

Registered: 2007-02-21

Posts: 198

drawing tablet recommendations

hey guys ... im 'eyein' the purchase of an entry-level inexpensive tablet for doing graphics work on my laptop. Needless to say my bluetooth mouse is not up to par and im even gonna talk about the touchpad.

Ive heard good things about the wacoms obviously, but im always a bit scared about linux compatibility. So i'm asking to you anyone out there who might know, if there are particular brands / model that behave better than others in a linux environment. Also, im wondering if once the driver pkg is installed how much of an hassle it is to use such a device. Does it involve extensive, pain-in-the-ass-esque xorg.conf manipulation or does it 'just work' most of the time ?

Id like this not to cost me a penny above 100-125 bucks if possible (yes - i said entry level - this is a hobby, not for work), so if you have recommendations, let me know.

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finferflu

Forum Fellow

From: Manchester, UK

Registered: 2007-06-21

Posts: 1,899

Website

Re: drawing tablet recommendations

I have bought the cheapest Wacom I could find, being only beginner, so I picked a Volito 2. It works well with linuxwacom.

You will eventually need to mess a bit with udev to get the "tablet" device instead of /dev/event#. I have blogged about it. Unfortunately it's Italian, but it should be quite straight forward, just following the commands:
http://openroom.shellpenguin.com/index. … nux-e-udev

If you can't undestand something, just ask me
Good luck!

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whompus

Member

From: Durham. UK

Registered: 2005-08-09

Posts: 256

Re: drawing tablet recommendations

This is what I did to get the tablet device as wacom

Install linuxwacom from community  pacman -S linuxwacom

Add wacom to the MODULES section of rc.conf

To prevent devices getting reordered on bootup create a udev rule called
10-wacom.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ with the following line

KERNEL=="event*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="056a", NAME="input/%k", SYMLINK="input/wacom"

BetterLeftUnsaid

Member

From: My Happy Place

Registered: 2007-11-04

Posts: 78

Re: drawing tablet recommendations

I have a Wacom Graphire 4, and for the most part, it's great.  The mouse that came with the tablet is kind of iffy (occasionally, certain button clicks won't register), but this seems to be improving with each version of linuxwacom.  whompus's instructions are about all it takes for everything to work nicely.

libby

Member

From: Vancouver, BC

Registered: 2007-11-24

Posts: 61

Re: drawing tablet recommendations

I have a Wacom Sapphire (oldie) and it required a bit of tweaking due to mouse conflicts and mainly configuring everything for left-handed use.  I love it, but my only recommendation would be to go for a 6X8 or higher drawing space. 

Wacom seems the way to go, so check out the wacom linux project link that finferflu provided...