Wacom support should work out of the box

Reference: bug 73156.

(repeating my comment on bug 73156)

Actually, /dev/wacom is created on startup, by /etc/init.d/wacom-tools. This file is owned by package 'wacom-tools', which *should* be required (or at least recommended) by xserver-xorg-input-wacom.

All this script does is to manually link /dev/wacom to the appropriate device, by grepping for wacom devices on /sys/bus/pnp/devices/*/id .

wacom-tools has a an udev rules file (65-wacom.rules), containing:

KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="056a", SYMLINK+="input/wacom"

This package (and relevant bits of package 'xorg') was inherited directly from Debian, without Ubuntu specific changes. I'll contact the Debian packager to know if he has any specific reasons on why he decided to do this manually instead of just use /dev/input/wacom and always rely on udev. (does udev works fine with devices attached on the serial port?)

For anyone stumbling on this bug while trying to get their wacom to work, here's what I had to do on edgy (it's possible that not all the steps are required):

1. Install wacom-tools and xinput
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment out those ForceDevice lines that say "Tablet PC ONLY".
3. Reconcile the difference between udev creating /dev/input/wacom and xorg.conf using /dev/wacom: you can either change xorg.conf, change /etc/udev/rules.d/65-wacom.rules, or symlink /dev/input/wacom to /dev/wacom (that's what I did for testing, but it won't survive a reboot, so I'll have to pick a device name and make udev and X consistent).

A useful tool for testing: /usr/X11R6/bin/xinput list (part of the xinput package). That's a lot faster than going through GIMP's input device preference panel every time.

Duplicate of bug 40473 ?

certainly a duplicate