I purchased one of these graphics tablets for use with my 12.3 openSUSE. The unit was not recognized out of the box - the system would see its USB presence but Gnome - System Settings would not pick up a tablet at all. I have managed to get this unit recognized and here’s how:
- get the linuxwacom project latest
- the linuxwacom-users list has a post [Linuxwacom-discuss] Status of support for CTH-480 (Intuos Pen & Touch, small) ?](http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31592023) which is very helpful. There is a post with two patches for the wacom driver, 0001… and 0002… - download these and apply in the wacom 3.7 directory
- recompile the wacom driver
- copy the wacom.ko generated to overwrite the module installed by Yast
- reboot, plug in tablet and the Gnome system settings now has a Wacom tablet icon which finds the tablet and shows details. Success!
Now to my issue - I am totally unused to graphics tablets and while I could just play around with the nice unit until it broke or I gave up, how would you experienced graphics tablet users suggest becoming familiar with the functionality of this unit in openSUSE under Gnome?
I have tried Gimp which is a beast of a thing for a beginner, I can see Gimp recognizes the tablet but it won’t draw anything for me. Libreoffice Draw also sees the tablet as a mouse I guess, and I can select freeform line and draw one line, but as soon as I raise the pen it kicks out of freeform mode and I can’t get it back in.
Is there a nice gentle howto or app that might help me become effective in the use of this new tool?
For anyone else in a similar situation, mtpaint is working out really well.
On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 13:06:01 +0000, colbec wrote:
> colbec;2596683 Wrote:
>> …
>>
>> Is there a nice gentle howto or app that might help me become effective
>> in the use of this new tool?
>
> For anyone else in a similar situation, mtpaint is working out really
> well.
That’s good to hear. I’ve got an Intuos 4M myself that works very
nicely, but I’m not familiar with the CTH480M. If it’s newer, it may not
be fully supported yet - but some of the people working on the drivers
actually work for Wacom, I understand. The official project is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxwacom/
They’ve got a couple mailing lists - definitely the definitive resource
on Wacom tablet support in Linux. 
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
Their patches were certainly what opened the door for me.
In a fast moving hardware world, an active Linux community is an excellent resource. From my reading, the Kernel folks are very conservative about including patches so it might be a while before the CTH480 family is supported without patching.
Since the patches update a kernel module which has to be manually copied over I guess there remains the issue of when Yast updates the package that contains wacom.ko. My tablet might stop working and I will have to repeat the copy procedure.
BTW Xournal is another very good simple application for familiarization with a tablet. It’s a quite different writing experience. I also tried cell-writer but the training procedure is not very easy.
On Sun, 10 Nov 2013 09:46:01 +0000, colbec wrote:
> BTW Xournal is another very good simple application for familiarization
> with a tablet. It’s a quite different writing experience. I also tried
> cell-writer but the training procedure is not very easy.
Yep, I’ve used Xournal myself quite a bit for this sort of thing -
filling in PDF forms and such - both writing and typing in information.
Really useful app.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C