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

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.

Here, for reference, are what happened to me, and how I fixed them.

Changing releases in Adept – In Breezy, you can change all the “Breezy” entries to “Dapper” graphically – but you need to press enter, not just click out of the fields, for it to stick. Still, first time I haven’t got down and dirty with a text editor to sort out /etc/apt/sources.list . However, given that people upgrade to a new release every six months, I’d have thought there’d be a button for it (”New release available!!!!1! or similar)

After downloading and installing all the new packages (with a couple of barfs along the way in packages from Universe), I rebooted, to find that it bailed at around the time when X should be firing up. Many years of nVidia card troubles pointed me in the right direction – two nVidia packages conflict. Apparently nvidia-glx conflicts with nvidia-settings on purpose nowadays, but it would make more sense if nvidia-settings had been removed by the upgrade process. And that’s the fix – remove both packages, and just reinstall nvidia-glx. (Oh, and browsing the web in a non-graphical browser sucks ass, still.)

When I started amaroK, all the songs finished instantly and it rapidly ended up at the end of the playlist. After a false start I eventually found the problem – mp3 playing for xine is now in a different package. But this is in the Multiverse, which I had never needed (multiverse = unsupported proprietry software) – and it seems strange that it’s not at least in Restricted ( = supported proprietry software), since mp3 playing is pretty routine. I’d imagine all the hardcore testers had all four repositories (main and universe are the others) enabled, and so didn’t spot this…

An unsolved problem is that something resets the master wave volume to zero every time I log on. the workaround is to use alsamixer to sort it out. The last version of Mandrake I used (back when it was called Mandrake!) had a similar problem for the surround sound, but I can’t remember if/how I fixed it.

And finally, when using firefox, every 30 seconds or so it would lock up for 5 seconds, blank the page, and then refresh with it set back to the top. Very, very annoying, but it’s a bug with the way that the gtk theming works for kde. Going to kcontrol and setting gtk apps to use a gtk theme sorts it out. (Launching firefox from a console gives lots of gtkpixbuf assertions, which is what gives it away). clues here, probably these bugs are the same problem: 46547, 48314.

All in all, an A- for the upgrade process. I would still prefer to upgrade a linux system rather than a windows system any day of the week (and that’s even bearing in mind I upgrade windows every day of the week, so I’m pretty au fait with 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.

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.

Once again, another virus (it doesn’t really matter which) has used security flaws in Microsoft Programs and Operating Systems to do some damage. Whilst the BBC has always taken care to mention the word “Microsoft” when describing which systems are affected, today is the first time that I have seen them mentioning the alternatives –

The worms affect Windows systems but not Linux or Apple Mac computers.

– albeit as the last paragraph of their article. It’s a start, but when such a disclaimer comes as the second or third sentence (preferably with “As usual”, “Once again”, or “We’re not surprised to note that” in front, I’ll be happy.

Folks, computers aren’t vulnerable to computer viruses. Email programs aren’t vulnerable to Email viruses. However, Microsoft Windows (of all varieties) is vulnerable to Windows viruses, Microsoft Internet Explorer is vulnerable to Internet Explorer exploits, and Microsoft Outlook is vulnerable to Outlook viruses (propagated via email). Linux, Mozilla and any email client you can name (that’s not Outlook) are not vulnerable to any of the above viruses.

Sure, other alternatives might be vulnerable to viruses written specifically to target them. But until that starts happening on a large scales, that possibility is only used to try and divert attention from Microsoft’s failings.

In Konqueror (the KDE file manager), there is a limit to the file size for the file previews to work, to try to stop your computer getting bogged down if you’ve got lots of large images. I ran into this today when I was trying to look at some of my new photos, since my shiny new toy takes rather large pictures, and only a couple of them were small enough that the preview worked. Searching for ‘kde preview image size limit’ picked up some stuff about the limit being hardcoded into KDE, but that’s waaay out of date, and you can change the limit from the menu nowadays. For KDE 3.0.3 at least (yes, I know how old it is), try Settings->Configure Konqueror->File Manager->Previews->Maximum File Size, and increase the slider.

Fairly obvious, I know, and I fixed the problem a lot quicker than it took to write all that out. But the internet is supposed to be the Source Of All Answers, so I’m just doing my bit.