Thursday 13th March 2008
Wacom Digitizer tablet on an HP 2710p with Ubuntu Gutsy (and Hardy) works fine
This is the latest in my series of “I spent so long searching on google for this, trawling through out of date nonsense to eventually twig the right answer to this problem” blog posts.
If you are running Ubuntu linux 7.10 (also known as Gutsy Gibbon) and are trying to get the Wacom tablet functions of an HP 2710p tablet to work, then hopefully you won’t waste about 6 hours trying. Or if you’re lucky, you also spend 6 hours of your employer’s time trying to figure it out, and it won’t seem so bad. Ahem.
Alternatively, to get the digitizer working quickly, simply edit the xorg configuration by running “sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf”, scroll down to the bottom, and where it says “Uncomment if you have a Wacom tablet” simply remove the # signs from the next three lines. It’s really that easy. I would say annoyingly easy.
Maybe you followed all the other stuff and got as far as trying to run “wacdump -f c100 /dev/ttyS0″ or “wacdump -f c100 /dev/input/wacom” or “wacdump -f c100 /dev/event0″ but they are all wrong. Variations on the wacdump theme might get you “WacomOpenTablet: Connection timed out” but that’s a red herring too. It’s actually “wacdump -f tpc /dev/input/wacom”, and you don’t actually need to setserial or compile tc1100ts.c or anything else. Hopefully the Ubuntu guys will figure out how to detect that there’s a Wacom tablet and do the uncommenting automagically for Hardy or later, but if not perhaps this’ll help. I’ve no idea if this will help for Fedora or SuSE or anything else, but if it does, feel free to let everyone know in the comments.
Update: Hardy 8.04
For anyone who is trying on Hardy, it works fine too. At the time of writing you just have to copy some stuff into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart the X server. No recompilation or anything like that. Add three more input devices, and then add the activation within the section ServerLayout. So actually marginally more difficult than it was in Gutsy, since the code used to be there ready and waiting.
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “stylus”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “stylus”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “eraser”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “eraser”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “cursor”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “cursor”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″# Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection
Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”
InputDevice “Synaptics Touchpad”
InputDevice “stylus” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “cursor” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “eraser” “SendCoreEvents”
EndSection
What??? No screenshots of you drawing like a three year old in The Gimp?
Comment by Sam — 14/3/2008 @ 11:43 am
Thanks! This worked first time for me. You’d think that it would be easy for the xorg installer to notice that the wacom device was present and do this automatically…
Now to get all those other little things behaving - fingerprint reader, automatic portrait/landscape switching, handwriting recognition, …
Comment by Matthew — 27/5/2008 @ 5:03 pm
Sorry to say this didn’t work for me on an HP TX2130. The xorg.conf is right, but no cigar…
Comment by James Valentine — 22/6/2008 @ 1:48 am
It didn’t work for me at first because I copied and pasted the code directly. Once I realized that the double quotes have to be the same, I replaced the open and close double quotes with regular double quotes. I also added tabs to suit the existing file structure.
Comment by Nirmal — 16/7/2008 @ 3:18 pm
Everything works beautifully after replacing the double quotes and inserted the tabs.
Comment by Nirmal — 16/7/2008 @ 3:20 pm
[…] seine XServer-Konfigurationsdatei nicht mit Anweisungen für USB-Tablets zumüllen und das dann als Stein der Weisen verkaufen. Wie es richtig geht, steht beim Linux-Wacom-Projekt, wo die notwendigen Ergänzungen der […]
Pingback by Privatstrand » Blog Archiv » (X)Ubuntu Hardy Heron auf HP 2710p Tablet-PC — 25/7/2008 @ 2:39 pm
I followed the instructions and the suggestions made in some of the comments (fix double quotes and tabs), but…
The top three section are not creating problems, when i try to add the last section (serverlayout) the X is not starting. I tried to add just the bolded part into Section “Screen” with no success. I keep getting an error about incorrect verbage (InputDevice is incorrect)… Help…
Comment by Oleg — 27/11/2008 @ 6:01 pm
Hi everyone, for those who are having trouble getting the wacon pen working on the HP 2710p tablet running 8.10, below should help
Steo 1: Edit the xorg.conf file. Run this command: gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Step2: Copy and paste the config below:
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “stylus”
# Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom” # USB ONLY?
Option “Device” “/dev/ttyS0″ # SERIAL ONLY
Option “Type” “stylus”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″ # Tablet PC ONLY
# Option “USB” “on” # USB ONLY
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “eraser”
# Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom” # USB ONLY?
Option “Device” “/dev/ttyS0″ # SERIAL ONLY
Option “Type” “eraser”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″ # Tablet PC ONLY
# Option “USB” “on” # USB ONLY
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “cursor”
# Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom” # USB ONLY?
Option “Device” “/dev/ttyS0″ # SERIAL ONLY
Option “Type” “cursor”
Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″ # Tablet PC ONLY
# Option “USB” “on” # USB ONLY
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “pad”
# Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom” # USB ONLY
Option “Device” “/dev/ttyS0″ # SERIAL ONLY
Option “Type” “pad”
# Option “USB” “on” # USB ONLY
EndSection
# Uncomment the following section if you you have a TabletPC that supports touch
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “touch”
Option “Device” “/dev/ttyS0″ # SERIAL ONLY
# Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom” # USB ONLY
Option “Type” “touch”
# Option “ForceDevice” “ISDV4″ # Serial Tablet PC ONLY
Option “USB” “on” # USB ONLY
EndSection
Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”
InputDevice “stylus” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “eraser” “SendCoreEvents”
InputDevice “cursor” “SendCoreEvents” # For non-LCD tablets only
InputDevice “pad” # For Intuos3/CintiqV5/Graphire4/Bamboo tablets
# InputDevice “touch” “SendCoreEvents” # Only a few TabletPCs support this type
EndSection
Step 3: Save the config
Step 4: Restart X: do a control +alt+ backspace. You will then see some lines with “checking battery state” on the last. X should start fairly quickly. If not, then you did something wrong.
Now can anyone recommend a writing journal software for the Tablet for Ubuntu and also has anyone has luck with the fingerprint biometric scanner?
Linux rocks, Vista sucks
Comment by Is_quitting_Microsoft — 12/1/2009 @ 3:32 pm