Wacom Graphire USB Mini-HOWTO

3. Requirements

3.1 Hardware

The main part is, of course, a computer with at least one USB port and a Wacom Graphire USB tablet.

3.2 Kernel

I've used the latest development kernel for my installation : linux-2.3.99-pre6. It's quite stable and has all the necessary features. You can also find some downports, which are patches for old 2.2.x kernels. You can find all the infos on the backport at http://www.suse.cz/development/usb-backport

3.3 Console Software

For the Linux console, the only program you need is gpm, available at ftp://ftp.prosa.it/pub/gpm

3.4 XWindow

For having all the abilities of your tablet, you'll need to use XInput. More specifically you'll need the xf86Wacom.so module (that is shipped with the most recent versions of XFRee86 starting from 3.3.5). Alternately, you may need the xf86WacomUSB.so, which is a work-in-progress of adapting the original xf86Wacom.so to use the USB. I'll speak of it later in this document.

3.5 Others

The applications supporting XInput are :

1. The Gimp - a powerful image manipulation program in the style of Photoshop. The 1.1.x instable development version includes XInput support as a standard feature. You can obtain Gimp from http://www.gimp.org
2. gsumi - a simple B/W drawing program that supports drawing / erasing with pressure and tilt sensitivity. Get it from the gsumi web page: http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gsumi/
3. xink (By Ralph Levien) - another rudimentary drawing program for X. xink is available from: ftp://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/raph/xink.tar.gz
4. RasMol - a molecular visualization program that supports a hardware dial box using XInput. look at http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/distrib/rasman.htm .
5. xinput (by Frederic Lepied) - a very useful utility for configuring and testing XInput devices. xinput is available from: ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz