Review – Wacom Graphire4 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

I finally cracked. This is what happens when you’re left alone for a few hours and start messing around in Inkscape. To be fair, however, I’ve wanted a graphic tablet for a long time — I could just never really justify the cost since I don’t draw too much. Anyway, I broke down and bought one knowing full well what a PIA it would be to get running ‘as expected’ under linux. But, it fucking rocks!

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

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