SLED 10 on a Gateway M275 Tablet - Enabling the Wacom Tablet

[brutimus]

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I have a Gateway M275 tablet with (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) SLED 10 installed and I wanted the tablet functionality to actually work. I searched the internet but found nothing exact. Following is my method of getting tablet functionality on my tablet. This should work on other tablet PCs as well as long as they use a Wacom interface. I will try to make these instructions as simple as possible for even the most novice of users.

First, open up "Software Management" in Yast and do a search for "wacom" (without the quotes). Install the two items in the result: 'x11-input-wacom' & 'x11-input-wacom-tools'. Exit Yast.

Open a terminal and use the 'wacdump' command to probe the output from the tablet:

wacdump -f c100 /dev/ttyS1

This section involved a lot of guess work on my part. I cannot guarantee yours will be exactly like mine. If you do just a straight 'wacdump' command, it will give you all the possible options. Since I knew the tablet was on a serial interface, I tried all of the serial device names until the very last one worked; the 'c100'. While doing this, you've also got to probe each of these devices on both the ttyS0 and ttyS1 (these are your two serial ports). Once you get the correct combination, it should bring up a sort of debugging screen where you can use your stylus and run it around on your screen and it will tell you the X Y position and all other information. From here on I will assume you are using: c100 on /dev/ttyS1.

Open sax2

sax2

Click on the "Tablet" section to the left. Then, under the "Tablet" tab, check "Activate This Tablet" and also select "Wacom" then "Graphire / Intuos (serial)". Under the "Port and Mode" tab, select "COM-2 [/dev/ttyS1]" and leave the other options alone. Under the "Electronic Pens" tab, check "Add Pen" and leave the properties alone. (You can also add an eraser if your stylus has one, but I've not tested this.) OK everything and exit sax2.

Open the terminal again so we can edit the xorg.conf file.

sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down to the "InputDevice" sections for the two wacom devices: Tablet and Pen. Under the Tablet section comment out (by adding a # in front of) the "SendCoreEvents" line and then add two lines after that (see the following code).

# Option	"SendCoreEvents" "on"
Option	"ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
Option	"TPCButton" "on"

Under the Pen Section comment out the "Protocol" line and add the same two lines from above (see code).

# Option  "Protocol" "Auto"
Option  "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
Option  "TPCButton" "on"

Save the xorg.conf file and close it.

Here is the wacom section of my xorg.conf file just for reference:

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "wacom"
  Identifier   "Mouse[5]"
  Option       "Device" "/dev/ttyS1"
  Option       "InputFashion" "Tablet"
  Option       "Mode" "Absolute"
  Option       "Name" "GRAPHIRE / INTUOS (SERIAL)"
#  Option       "SendCoreEvents" "on"
  Option       "Type" "cursor"
  Option       "Vendor" "WACOM"
  Option       "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
  Option       "TPCButton" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "wacom"
  Identifier   "Mouse[7]"
  Option       "Device" "/dev/ttyS1"
  Option       "InputFashion" "Pen"
  Option       "Mode" "Absolute"
  Option       "Name" "GRAPHIRE / INTUOS Stylus (SERIAL)"
 # Option       "Protocol" "Auto"
  Option       "Type" "stylus"
  Option       "Vendor" "WACOM"
  Option       "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
  Option       "TPCButton" "on"
EndSection

After this you should be able to restart X with CTRL+ALT+Backspace and your tablet functionality should be working. If it doesn't, then I suggest experimenting around with the different settings, devices, etc.

[bigtomrodney]

That's some nice work there, thank you for posting it up for others to see. I'm using Ubuntu as I post which seems to have a lot of wacom devices listed just in case that comes in handy-

Section "InputDevice"

                                                      # /dev/input/event
                                                      # for USB
    Identifier     "eraser"
    Driver         "wacom"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/wacom"          # Change to
    Option         "Type" "eraser"
    Option         "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"               # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

                                                      # /dev/input/event
                                                      # for USB
    Identifier     "cursor"
    Driver         "wacom"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/wacom"          # Change to
    Option         "Type" "cursor"
    Option         "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"               # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

[brutimus]

Yeah I made a post in the Ubuntu Forums on how to get this working awhile back: here. Here's my wacom section off of my Ubuntu box, which is another Gateway M275.

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "stylus"
  Option        "Device"        "/dev/ttyS1"          # Change to
                                                      # /dev/input/event
                                                      # for USB
  Option        "Type"          "stylus"
  Option        "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"               # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "eraser"
  Option        "Device"        "/dev/ttyS1"          # Change to
                                                      # /dev/input/event
                                                      # for USB
  Option        "Type"          "eraser"
  Option        "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"               # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "cursor"
  Option        "Device"        "/dev/ttyS1"          # Change to
                                                      # /dev/input/event
                                                      # for USB
  Option        "Type"          "cursor"
  Option        "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"               # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

[mu2marc]

Hi Folks,

Well, 8 hours of messing around and I'm stuck. I can't even get to a stable desktop, Install goes weird when finalizing ( used 5 disk set and 2 different install DVD's for 3 separate attempts )

While finalizing the install, during the 'scanning hardware' phase, after 'release notes', the LCD goes black ( still backlit, just black )
Finally got around this problem and booted to desktop but screen resolutions were defaulted wrong to 800x600, couldn't boot to SAX from desktop, instead rebooted to Root level 3, fired up SAX and made the xorg config changes for resolution from there.

This fixed the problem, I thought, however on subsequent reboots, LCD would show a scrambled blue screen or it would be black.

Turns out, Linux was trying to push the video signal out to the LCD and the External CRT port at the same time.
I plugged a monitor into confirm this, then rebooted, accessed the BIOS and disabled 'CRT' in the BIOS.

This made no difference, symptoms were as above. I can't even get SUSE 10.2 to run a stable desktop on a 1024x768 screen resolution never mind enable tablet pc functionality......haven't got that far yet.

Anyone help ?????

[brutimus]

I don't mean to be pushing any one distro over another. But if you don't have to have some functionality of SUSE, I would suggest looking at Ubuntu. I didn't really have much trouble with either distro on my m275. In a previous post, i talk about the instructions I made on getting tablet functionality to work under Ubuntu. It's just an option. Let me know what you find out in regards to my reply to your PM.