3. Requirements

This chapter is about what is needed to get your tablet working.

3.1 Which Hardware is supported

First of all, you should have a tablet, of course. This should be a product that connects to the serial port (RS232) of your computer, because USB support for linux is still under development. At the time of writing (Mar 2000) kernel support starts for the newer usb products graphire and intuos, and it is worked on the XFree driver. Gpm is unmaintained for now, so we can not expect an usb driver for it in the near future.

The following Wacom tablets are supported:

• ArtZ II series (known in Europe as the UltraPad series - the same UltraPad name also was used for earlier tablets that only work partially.)
• ArtPad II
• PL300 (combined LCD screen and tablet)
• Pen Partner
• Graphire alias FAVO (mouse and pen, get at least the alpha 16 driver for full support from http://www.lepied.com/xfree86/).
• Intuos series (support may be only partial with the driver of your distribution, get updated alpha versions from Frederic Lepied's page: http://www.lepied.com/xfree86/)

The older SD and HD series are not supported by the standard XFree86 driver, however, a modified driver that supports these devices as well some OEM products with embedded screens including the IBM Thinkpad 360 PE and Toshiba T200 is available from: http://hwr.nici.kun.nl/pen-computing/pen-computing-formats.html

3.2 Which Software is needed

• If you want support for the linux console, get the latest version of gpm from ftp://ftp.prosa.it/pub/gpm or from ftp://animal.unipv.it/pub/gpm (mirror)

• If you want support for XFree86, use at least version 3.3.3.1 or get the latest from http://www.xfree.org

3.3 Which Software is supported

• For the linux console, the only program I know is gpm.

• For XFree, the keyword is XInput. This specification has to be supported by device drivers which provide extra information. In turn, XInput has to be understood by programs which want to use alternative pointer devices.

There is a big number of programs based on the gtk library. The gtk has XInput support and makes it very easy to use.
At least the following applications support XInput:

• 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. We are awaiting the next stable release, Version 1.2.x. Obtain Gimp from http://www.gimp.org , it really deserves it ! I am sure most of you know this and it was the reason to buy a tablet.

• 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/

• xink (By Ralph Levien) - another rudimentary drawing program for X.

  xink is available from: ftp://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/raph/xink.tar.gz

• RasMol - a molecular visualization program that supports a hardware dial box using XInput. look at http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/distrib/rasman.htm .

• 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