Wacom Bamboo tablet and Linux: Anyone experience with it? On which level of abstraction is it supported?

Question

1. Does anyone has experience with this device under Linux?

2. On which level of abstraction is the Wacom Bamboo tablet supported?

   • Is the device input just translated to mouse input, so that every application can profit from it?

   • Or do I need special (design|paint|...)-software which explicitly supports this device?

Answer 1

I couldn't specifically answer your question as I don't own a Wacom tablet, but I do own a Genius Wizardpen tablet so I could make an educated guess the answer for question#2, considering the fact that Wacom is the de facto tablet that is best supported in Linux among other competitors.

1. Yes, the device input is translated into mouse input so you could use it as a pointing device
2. Currently the two most important graphics application: GIMP and Inkscape supports tablets with pressure information. Usually it'll work out of the box, if not, it's quite easy to configure it

For more information, you could refer to the Ubuntu wiki - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wacom

Answer 2

There is excellent support for Wacom devices on Linux; I've been using them for years. I'm typing this on a Wacom tablet PC using Linux right now.

Ubuntu is the distro with which I'm most familiar, so I've referred to this documentation a lot:

• Ubuntu community documentation on Wacom
• Extensive Ubuntu Wacom guide
• Detailed how-to with a different Wacom pad

According to that, there are extra setup steps you can take to enable special features (like touch-sensitivity) in GIMP, and it looks like the Bamboo pad should work just fine without any special configuration. On my computer, the Wacom tablet was detected and enabled automatically on installation. Other distros will have different setup procedures, but the Wacom drivers will still work just as well.

In applications that don't specifically support Wacom input, the pen behaves just like a mouse. In fact, since I'm not an artist, that's how I use the device all the time!