First Thoughts

My 2 biggest fears were: a) a lot of work to make it work & b) it would conflict with my ordinary mouse (I’m not a huge fan of using mouse pads or their POS mouse on the tablet. Adhering to the linux mentality that a tool should do 1 job very well, the Wacom “mouse” just wasn’t in my best interest).

Fear A: The tablet was immediately recognized by Ubuntu — bonus! Apparently Ubuntu already came with the drivers for Wacom, althought I did install wacom-tools [sudo apt-get install wacom-tools] — not really sure what those do, but it can’t hurt, right?

Fear B: My ordinary mouse still works as it should — now I can throw away this god-awful ‘only works on a 4×5″ surface’ mouse.

New Thoughts

Still buzzing with excitement from my impulse buy and no-shit configuration I started to get giddy. Pop open the Gimp & Inkscape and see what my hard earned dollars actually did for me. Ouch, disappointment. Anyone who knows me can tell that I’m not the most gentle person on gadgets — in fact, I tend to put them through hell. The damn stylus was WAY too sensitive for my brutish handwork. I basically expected this thing to work like a mouse — it moves around and when I click a button it draws. Stupid of me to assume that give its pressure-sensitive nature, but, I’m impulsive.

Fears shattered and dreams recognized — at long last!

I began digging around to make this thing work how I wanted it to work. Ubuntu community didn’t really have the answers I needed, so I turned to my good ‘ole pal: man. With a little investigation into man wacom I noticed a nice little setting for xorg.conf called “Threshold.” This would allow me to adjust the sensitivity on the stylus to engage the clicking. It states that the default threshold is roughly (MaxPressure*3/50) — which came out to ~30… way too soft for me. I pushed that bitch up to around 220 and now its working perfectly. Hooray!

EOF;

All in all, I’d highly recommend this for anyone who was considering a graphic tablet but was curious to see how it would work under linux first. Definitely a good buy and worth the money

Other Config Stuff

Setting up GIMP was simple enough. In File>Preferences>Input Devices>Configure Extended Input Devices you just set the eraser, stylus and cursor to ‘Screen’ and you now have a fully functional tablet.

Inkscape was the same. File>Input Devices just set them all to ‘Screen.’ When using the Pen (c) just make sure to click the ‘Use Pressure’ and ‘Use Tilt’ actions to get the best results.

In /etc/X11/xorg.conf I also set the following under “Stylus”:

Option "PressCurve" "50,0,100,50" # Custom preference
This should let make the pressure curve a little stronger.

More Information & Links
Ubuntu:Community:Wacom

Gnome’s default keybinding app sucks (maybe Linus was right and Gnome treats its users like idiots? sucks for me I guess). Here is a way to bind anything you’d like to any key you’d like, globally. I found this useful because I naturally use WIN-E for an explorer or WIN-R for a run dialog and I couldn’t get that working the right way through Gnome’s default shortcut app (/System/Preferences/Keyboard Shortcuts).

Anyway, doing this is really simple. Open up a terminal and type gconf-editor. Browse the /app/Metacity/global_keybindings and keybinding_commands. Edit the corresponding global_keybinding command_# to the keybinding_command command_# and you’re golden.

Click for larger view

Click for larger view

Step 1:
In gnome goto System -> Administration -> Network and click on the ‘Hosts’ tab

Step 2:
For your normal localhost (127.0.0.1) double-click or hit ‘properties’ to edit it. Add your list of subdomains under localhost.

*Ignore the text in this pic, I overlooked that you had to include _all_ aliases in the same box. Whoops

Step 3:
The fun step
Open a terminal and type sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default — assuming you’re using the “default” httpd.conf. Chances are that you will be, and if you aren’t you should know what file I’m talking about anyway. (If you don’t, just load one of the enabled apache configuration files)

Change these lines:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>

to

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>

Step 4:
Add the following (for each subdomain you made) — changing the ServerName to whatever you aliased in the network host dialogue and DocumentRoot to wherever you want the subdomain to point.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
	ServerName mysql.localhost
	DocumentRoot /var/www/phpmyadmin
</VirtualHost>

Step 5:
In a terminal type: sudo apache2ctl restart
When that finishes, browse to http://mysql.localhost and you should see phpMyAdmin (going by my example)

On OSX + Apache 1.33

Step 1:
Open /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager and click on “machines”
I usually just duplicate the localhost settings, or just create a new record below localhost that is something like:

ip_address: 127.0.0.1
name: mysql.localhost
serves: ./local

Click for bigger version

Step 2:
Repeat Steps 3-5 above only editing “/etc/httpd/users/{yourname}.conf” instead.

Click for bigger version

Restart Apache and hopefully all went well. I found this useful because I hate typing unnecessary paths

Theres a few common solutions:

Every Flavour Beans mentions its either a login timing (GDM) issue, or a samba auto-mount issue. The solution there was to either: a) disable all samba shares (I’m not 100% if they meant temporarily or forever — either way, this was a last resort since I hate this kind of stuff) and b) disabling automatic logins through gnome’s GDM.

I didn’t have auto-login enabled, so I figured “what the hell” and set it to auto-login with a 10 second timer. When I re-logged I didn’t get the HAL error, but I also didn’t get my auto mounted drives back. Shit. Next.

I decided to poke around a bit more to see what the bigger picture is. I knew it couldn’t be a big issue since I wasn’t installing/configuring/etc. at the time of the crash — something just got “stuck.” I stumbled upon another site which mentioned running sudo /usr/sbin/hald --daemon=no --verbose=yes to view the output.

After running that I got a suspicious message pointing to the real issue: Error binding udev_event socket: Address already in use. Damn udev. Anyways, I tossed up a sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart and re-booted. Lo and behold – all is well.

(Again, this post is more for my future reference in case I get this error again)