Wacom Bamboo

[Midgardsormr]

My pleasure. I like being useful when I have the time to spend on it.

[Nevynxxx]

Slightly off topic, but sine Mid mentioned driver issues

What experience do people have with using these tablets with Linux?

[jfrazierjr]

My biggest issue (which is minor) with my Bamboo is that I can't just plug it in and have GIMP recognize it. Since I use laptops (4 different ones so far), every time I plug the tablet in, I have to go to the Wacom Tablet utility and THEN start GIMP after doing that and go to Edit->Preferences to have GIMP notice that there is a tablet there. Not sure if this is a Driver issue or if it's a GIMP problem. Note that this is on 4 laptops with 3 running Vista and one on Windows 7 where the tablet is never plugged in except when needed for use.

Again, this is a minor inconvenience at best, but other than that, I LOVE my Bamboo, and the only thing I would like about it more were if it had more buttons I could assign for things like brush size, opacity(tool opacity rather than pressure opacity which it does very well), etc. I got the $199 Bamboo Fun when it was on sale plus I had a coupon, so got it for $150 about a year ago. At this point, I don't have any need of anything better, though if I had to get a new one, I would probably get the Pen and Touch version so I could use it like my trackpad for general mouse movement with my fingers.

[Midgardsormr]

There is a users group for running Wacom tablets under Linux. I understand that they're fairly responsive, but I haven't started experimenting with Linux yet, so I don't have any first-hand knowledge about it. Wacom itself provides no Linux support.

Since we're on the topic, if you use a tablet under Vista, I recommend uninstalling (or at least turning off) Windows' Tablet PC utility. It conflicted with my Intuous3 driver, randomly turning off pressure sensitivity in Photoshop and preventing me from mapping the drawing surface to a single screen.

[12rounds]

Slightly off topic, but sine Mid mentioned driver issues

What experience do people have with using these tablets with Linux?

I'm running both Graphire and Intuos tablets in Ubuntu Linux (version 9.10 now) without problems. They are automatically in use once plugged in. But to get the Intuos buttons to work, one has to install "wacom-tools" (available in default Ubuntu repository so installing it just a few clicks) package and run a program called "wacomcpl". Wacomcpl has a graphical user interface to define everything related to the tablet (and I do mean everything - like changing the height from which the tablet picks up the pen tip and such tweakings).

I would imagine Bamboo tablets are well supported since Graphire and Intuos work fine and their penetration in user base must be much smaller than Bamboo.


I also do have ONE problem which is related to a VirtualBox virtual machine. I have a Windows XP installed in a virtual machine, but Ubuntu is reluctant to let go of the control of the tablet and hence the tablet pressure sensitivity gets lost when used within the virtualized WinXP. Granted it's been a long time since I last tested so it may have been fixed.

[Nevynxxx]

Cool, thanks, Sounds good.