<div dir="ltr">Hiya, Dean. I've used graphics tablets quite a bit with Linux, and they're pretty painless these days. I've only ever used a Wacom Graphire, however, so I don't much know if it's easy with other brands. Wacom is expensive, as you said. and if you plan on getting a lot of use out of it, you might find it packs up after a year or so; they're not as hardy as I'd like. On the other hand, they do work and they're as good quality as you're going to find anywhere. If you're going to be tabletting frequently, especially if you're going to be drawing or painting, it's probably a good investment and also probably the only investment. I do know that some other brands of tablets are actually old Wacoms in disguise, and so might work fine with the linuxwacom drivers, but check before you get one if you go that route. <br>
<br>Getting pressure sensitivity to work (for my Wacom) has been easy enough in the various distros I've done it on (various early Ubuntus, Debian, Gentoo, SourceMage and Fedora 8 and 9) it's usually just a case of installing the linuxwacom package from the package manager, and then editing xorg.conf. Plenty of guides offer the exact details, so I'll let you find one that's specifically Ubuntu if you get a Wacom, shouldn't be too hard to locate a relevant HowTo on the official forums or just with a web-search. The most heartache I've had over it is setting up the devices neatly, with horrible udev rules and such, but recent guides usually go through that properly and it's not too fiddly. It used to be OK to specify the /dev/input/event# expliticly, but it's considered better form to do it in a way that's a bit more automagical.<br>
<br>For other tablets, there are a few guides out there but I've no experience with 'em. <br><br>As for software, GIMP is probably the best. Sure, it's a weirdo Photoshop clone, but it does work. If you feel like mixing it up a bit, you could locate a copy of OpenCanvas 1.#, which can sometimes be gotten working under Wine. It's smooth and fast, but lacks some of the basics (while offering two features that are almost unique and very cool: playback and networked collaborative painting). MyPaint is fun, it's not as mature as the GIMP but it's got a ridiculous number of brush options to play with and an 'infinite' canvas; definitely worth a look (<a href="http://mypaint.intilinux.com/">http://mypaint.intilinux.com/</a>). I use it for sketching, it's not got layers yet so it's a bit too limited for actual paint work unless you're into the naturalish traditional-painty look.<br>
<br>I've not used Photoshop for years, and never under Wine; I don't find GIMP bad enough to warrant it and I don't really do enough art to afford an expensive tablet -and- an expensive paint app.<br><br>Hope some of that helps ya',<br>
Tom<br><br></div>