Comments on: Ubuntu 8.04 And My Tablet

By: Ian Clifton

Ian Clifton — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:26:40 +0000

My first guess would be that you’re maxing out the processor. I always keep the system monitor graphs showing on my panel (right click on the panel, add to panel…, system monitor, add), but you can use gnome-system-monitor or top to keep an eye on system resources. If the processor is being maxed, check if anything else is using a chunk of the processor and close it if possible. You may just have to zoom in a little and use smaller brushes. My desktop has a particularly rough time with the healing tool in GIMP, so I end up working much more slowly and with a smaller brush (“[" and "]” allow you to quickly change brush sizes in GIMP). It can be frustrating sometimes, but it’s much better than the hand cramps I get when trying to be precise for too long with the mouse.

By: Sam

Sam — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:47:08 +0000

Well, I just got my new laptop, also a budget Acer, and had to figure out the process of getting this thing to work. Much easier this time around. The thing that was getting me was not changing the mouse #. I do have an issue with the pen periodically drawing slower than my hand moving– Consequently screwing up my pictures. Do you have any ideas on this?

thanks

By: Ian Clifton

Ian Clifton — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:30:31 +0000

Check if the logs are showing anything helpful:
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep Tablet

If not, it’s pretty hard to figure out where to start. You can always make a backup of your xorg.conf, delete the driver, and “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” to essentially start from scratch.

By: Shubbar

Shubbar — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:26:47 +0000

Still cann’t get it working after changing the drivers and editing the xorg.conf file. And for a beginner, I don’t know where to start troubleshooting.

By: Ian Clifton

Ian Clifton — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:40:43 +0000

Glad I could mostly help. From what I’ve read, support for the tablet mouse is nil; I’ve never even used it myself. If it’s the scroll wheel on your other mouse that is having trouble, the main setting to look at is

Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″

Make sure that’s set in the relevant input device section. If it is and restarting X doesn’t work, you can try other numbers (6, 7 is fairly common). If that doesn’t work and you’re willing to try a stronger solution, you can make a backup copy of your xorg.conf as it is now with the tablet working and then run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

That will recreate the xorg.conf and hopefully make the scroll wheel work. If it succeeds, you can compare the file it generated with the one you saved (that has your tablet working) and see if you can track down which setting is different/missing.

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:44:29 +0000

Thank you for your post. I was finally able to figure out how to get the pen to work………. Mostly. I guess I’m doomed to always having some drawbacks. The mouse that came with the pen isn’t working so well, but that’s not a big deal to me. What I am concerned about is that the scrolling on my laptop mouse has stopped functioning. Any ideas on how to correct that? I’m on an acer aspire 3690. It’s funny, it didn’t work on Windows, but then I switched to Ubuntu, and have grown so accustomed to it. Now it seems like everything is so much more work with out it. It’s a catch 22. I’d really like it to work, but I also want to keep my pen tablet working.

At any rate, thanks for saving my pen!