Working Tablet + GIMP = :)

Back about a week ago, I posted about the trouble I was having getting my Wacom tablet to work correctly with the GIMP. It wasn’t moving over the full extents of the screen, and it wasn’t getting recognized as an extended input device in the GIMP (which lets you use pressure-sensitivity).

As you can see by the image above, I now have it working. But I almost forgot to post about getting it to work. Thanks to Donncha for sending me a comment on that previous post which reminded me. BTW there are some awesome photos on Donncha’s blog, you should check them out.

So here’s the story. I cleaned up my xorg.conf file so that any references to serial or tablet-pc based entries in the wacom sections of the file were deleted. I also uninstalled and reinstalled the wacom-tools package as well.

But I’m not sure which (if any) of those things were the problem. My other problem was (and is) is that restarting X after each modification didn’t seem to work properly. Normally (for the Ubuntu distro anyway) you hit Ctrl-Backspace to restart X. On my machine, this logs me out, returns me to the GDM login prompt as expected. But on re-logging in, it can never get back to the desktop. I end up stuck at a light blue screen with full mouse movement but no desktop to speak of. The only option left is to reboot.

So being the newbie that I am, I was making changes to my xorg.conf file and then logging out and logging back in. Apparently, this does NOT restart the Xserver which means any of the changes I had made were not ‘taking’.

The long and short of it is that I cleaned up the xorg.conf file, reinstalled the wacom-tools package and then the next morning when I started up the machine, the tablet was working fine. The Gimp recognized it and full pressure sensitivity was enabled.

Sorry there was no magical answer here. But I can say that there are several good threads on getting tablet devices to work. If you want to see what my current xorg.conf file looks like, I posted it right here in a message thread on ubuntuforums.org. It seems to work flawlessly for me right now so check it out if you’re having problems.

Note: I have a Wacom Graphire3 tablet, a miniature notebook sized MS mouse (for my daughter), and a normal sized mouse, all of which are USB( and all of which are always hooked up and all of which seem to work perfectly now). I’m running Ubuntu Edgy with Beryl installed. If you have a serial model or are using a different distribution or setup your mileage may vary.

Tablet Woes + GIMP = Frustration

I haven’t had a chance to edit many photos lately – too busy fooling around with Inkscape and trying to write a blog post every day in November I guess 😉

However I finally made some time and brought up the GIMP (the Linux equivalent to Photoshop for all intents and purposes). I quickly found out that my Graphire3 tablet wasn’t being recognized or at least recognized properly. I figured it was a result of my upgrade to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a while back or maybe my installation of Beryl threw my settings for a loop, and set about to correct the problem.

Well, it’s 3 days later and still no luck. I’ve read, re-read and re-re-read several message threads about the subject on ubuntuforums.org and I must have edited my xorg.conf file six ways from Sunday – and yet still nothing.

Actually, ‘nothing’ is not really the correct term. The pointer moves, but only over a limited rectangular portion of the screen. And to make matters worse, the device is not recognized as an ‘extended input device’ in the GIMP which means pressure sensitivity is not enabled. If you’ve ever used one of these tablets for photo editing, you’d know that pressure sensitivity is what makes it infinitely better than a mouse for photo editing.

Anyhoo, rest assured that I will fix the problem come hell or high water. And when I do I will undoubtedly post about it.