[Newark] Linux (Ubuntu) Graphics Tablets

[Khismett Riddle]

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.

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.

For other tablets, there are a few guides out there but I've no experience
with 'em.

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 (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/). 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.

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.

Hope some of that helps ya',
Tom
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