Wacom Tablet HOWTO

4. Tablets as Mouse-Replacement for the Linux-Console

4.1 Tablets and gpm

The gpm daemon supports allot of input devices, including tablets. If you want a list of the supported devices of your gpm, do a

gpm -t help

The Wacom driver of gpm 1.18.0 and below seems to be for the very old artpad models, the documentation does not say anything about this. I tested it with ultrapad, penpartner, graphire and intuos models but it did not work. I have rewritten the wacom driver for gpm, to use it you need at least gpm version 1.18.2 . Since 1.18.2, the old wacom driver has been replaced with my driver for wacom graphire, penpartner and ultrapad products.

However, if you own an old artpad, use gpm < 1.18.1 and try:

killall gpm ; gpm -t wacom -m /dev/ttyS0

If you own a graphire, use gpm > 1.18.1 instead and use

for the relative (mouse-like) mode:

killall gpm ; gpm -t wacom -o relative -m /dev/ttyS0

killall gpm ; gpm -t wacom -o absolute -m /dev/ttyS0

Of course, you get only the buttons and the movement function, pressure and tilt are not supported because they are not too useful in text-based applications.
There is no support for ultrapad macro buttons or graphire mouse wheel.

If you use gpm and XFree86, you may or may not run in problems, because normally a device can be opened only by one program at a time. There are two solutions for that:

• The gpm repeater mode. If you start gpm with the "-R protocol" option, it will repeat all data it gets to the device /dev/gpmdata. Let us say, you have a ps2 type mouse and your gpm call looks like: gpm -t ps2 -Rmman then gpm gets your ps2 mouse data and tries to translate this into a mman packet, which it will emit to /dev/gpmdata. Unfortunately, gpm can translate to only a few protocols at the time of writing. Since gpm 1.18.1, these protocols to which can be translated are marked with an asterix at the first column. Again, do a gpm -t help to get the list.

  If you want to omit the translation and only get the data byte for byte, just call gpm -t ps2 -R raw . You can then make XFree use that second device by putting the line Device "/dev/gpmdata" in your XF86Config in the pointer section or the XInput section.

• If you use startx, you can modify it that it does a gpm -k before the X-Server is started. This option kills a running gpm.