This is the latest in my series of “I spent so long searching on google for this, trawling through out of date nonsense to eventually twig the right answer to this problem” blog posts.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 “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

(or how I learned to stop worrying and trust my instincts)

I use wikis a fair amount nowadays, and I get used to just being able to update things that are wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of info on the web is still in forums and suchlike, which aren’t quite suited to collaborative documentation. For that, we still have to rely on many people writing their own documentation, and let google filter out the right one.

For instance, I was trying to install freenx on ubuntu dapper today. This thread seems to be widely acknowledged as the definitive guide to setting it up, but it just smelled a bit to complicated to me. A bit more hunting around, and I found this guide, which is a lot more straightforward (and just as importantly, worked fine). But even then, it’s not quite right - the URL for the repository seems suspiciously unofficial. So I found this list of mirrors, which is on a wiki, but isn’t part of any install guide.

Don’t underestimate how hard it is to write good documentation - it needs to be minimalistic as well as comprehensive. But today’s lesson is that if something seems more complicated than it needs to be, it probably is. Oh, and I wish freenx was in dapper by default, but I’m not sure that anyone is working on it.

So Kubuntu Dapper came out last week, and I thought I would try to upgrade. Last time went moderately well, and the same again this time - only moderately well. Still, four problems for an operating system upgrade (and in the linux world, that’s every single application as well) isn’t too bad.

Here, for reference, are what happened to me, and how I fixed them.
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It’s been a few days of upgrades recently. First off was the new version of Firefox, released last week. The lightning-fast forward and back is great - especially noticeable when you click on a link halfway down a page, and hit back. No more reshuffling the page as the layout is recalculated. Also, error pages (server not found and so on) are shown as pages, instead of dialog boxes. That’s been a long time coming. The only downside is that most of the themes haven’t been upgraded, so I had to find a different one. Most of the plugins I used are now redundant, since tabs are a lot easier to work with. Overall, a highly recommended upgrade. (If you don’t use Firefox already, you really should try it!)

Yesterday was a not-quite seamless upgrade for my Kubuntu install. I think it took about three chunks of upgrades to sort itself out - each time it would upgrade about a third of the packages. But it eventually worked, and I like the minor upgrades to all the software that I use (and especially to the package manager!). And it’s so nice having the OS and all the programs you ever need sorting themselves out automagically.

I’ve finally got round to upgrading the software that powers this weblog. That’s been a long time coming too. So if you notice anything wrong (or badly styled) let me know. I’ve also got all the spam-filtering plugins disabled; I want to see how well the new version copes by itself. It’s like putting your head in a lions mouth to see if he’s hungry…

This post was brought to you by the words “Open Source”, “Free Software”, and “absolutely fantastic”. Oh, and probably “preaching to the choir” too.

Every so often, there’s something about KDE that really impresses me. This time it’s text selection in KPDF. I’ve just tried to copy some code from a pdf into kdevelop, so I had to activate the selection tool. Surprisingly, it’s a rectangular selection tool - you select the area you want, and then choose whether you want the text, or an image of the selected area copied to the clipboard. Ingeniously, I wanted to copy the code without the line numbers - not a problem.

It’s the little things like this that really impress me about linux and KDE in general. A couple of months ago I upgrade my linux box for the first time in three years, and the more I use it, the more impressed I get. “KIOSlaves” are fantastic too, and are one of these really simple and obvious things that come in really useful. I can’t find a simple explanation of them though, so maybe I’ll need to write a “KIOSlaves in fifty words” entry at some point.

I like Linux a lot, and I think the sentiments in this article are pretty much spot on. But seriously, look at the graph on the front page. Can anyone really keep a straight face during a board meeting with a projected growth like that? A quite-blatantly levelling off turning into a doubling just because you can squiggle the axis? Anyhoo, I’m sure that linux’s natural level will be a bit higher than a measley 3%. Eventually.