I don't like to see queries on these forums go unanswered, and in common with others here I've been trying to get an old Wacom Bamboo tablet working with my Pi.
I was really hoping to get the tablet working with the wonderful TuxPaint (
http://www.tuxpaint.org - install under Raspbian: sudo apt-get install tuxpaint tuxpaint-data tuxpaint-stamps) program to allow my daughter to draw using the Pi as she's too young to be able to manipulate a mouse. I think these small and inexpensive Wacom tablets are potentially ideal to allow younger children to use the Pi.
Well, I'm pleased to report that I've been able to get the Wacom Bamboo tablet working as a USB HID device on the Pi under Raspbian. The tablet now works really well with TuxPaint on the Pi. The software you need comes from the very complete Linux Wacom Tablet project on SourceForge (
http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... /Main_Page).
The crux of getting a Wacom tablet working on the pi is compiling and installing the Linux Wacom Project kernel driver for the pi. I found everything I needed to know about getting this done on notro's GitHub rpi-source project (
https://github.com/notro/rpi-source/wiki).
Here are the steps that I followed to get the Wacom Bamboo working under Raspbian with kernel version 3.12.28+ - no doubt there are improvements and simplifications that could be made to this process, but by following the steps below, you should end up with a working Wacom tablet!
Firstly, install the Wacom code from the Raspbian repositories (these seem to lack the necessary linux kernel driver, which has been the source of people's difficulties in getting these tablets working as HID devices):
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sudo apt-get install libwacom-common libwacom-dev libwacom2 xserver-xorg-input-wacom
I'm not actually sure how much, or if any, of the above is actually needed, but I installed it all anyhow.
Now we need to install the linux headers in order to be able to compile a kernel module - use the 'uname -r' command to find your kernel version (3.12.28+ in my case), and then use the command below to installs the appropriate headers (you can see a list of the available headers by using the 'aptitude search linux-headers' command):
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sudo apt-get install linux-headers-3.12
Next, install ncurses-dev (I think this is needed by rpi-source, which is used later to install the linux kernel source code):
We also need to install version 4.8 of gcc (you can check which version you have using the 'gcc --version' command)
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sudo apt-get install -y gcc-4.8 g++-4.8
Now update the default gcc to version 4.8:
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sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.6 20
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.8 50
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.6 20
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.8 50
Next, we need to get notro's amazing rpi-source utility from github:
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sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notro/rpi-source/master/rpi-source -O /usr/bin/rpi-source && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-source && /usr/bin/rpi-source -q --tag-update
Now run the rpi-source utility to fetch and install the appropriate linux kernel source code:
The rpi-source utility will install the linux kernel source into /root/linux, but the Linux Wacom Project code expects to find the source in /usr/src/linux, so I just made a symbolic link to deal with this:
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sudo ln -s /root/linux /usr/src/linux
I found that I also needed to make the resulting directories readable:
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sudo chmod 755 /root
sudo chmod 755 /root/linux
sudo chmod 755 /usr/src/linux
Now that we've got the linux-headers and kernel source code installed, we can download and compile the linux Wacom kernel driver. Use a web browser to navigate to
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxwa ... put-wacom/ and download the latest input-wacom driver code from the Linux Wacom Tablet project SorceForge project (I used the input-wacom-0.23.0.tar.gz tar ball).
Once you've downloaded the driver source code, navigate on the command line to wherever you downloaded the code and unpack it, and enter the resulting directory:
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tar xvf input-wacom-0.23.0.tar.gz
cd input-wacom-0.23.0/
From within the input-wacom-0.23.0 directory (or whichever version you've downloaded), build the driver code by using the following command:
if the configure script runs successfully, you'll find the magic 'wacom.ko' kernel driver within a directory named '3.7'. You now need to copy the wacom.ko kernel driver to the appropriate location for loading into your linux kernel:
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sudo mkdir /lib/modules/3.12.28+/kernel/drivers/input/tablet
sudo cp 3.7/wacom.ko /lib/modules/3.12.28+/kernel/drivers/input/tablet
sudo depmod -a
Note that the location of the kernel drivers will depend on the version number of your linux kernel - as mentioned above, you can determine this version number by using the 'uname -r' command. As I mentioned above, my system is running Raspbian with linux kernel version 3.12.28+.
Now that the Wacom kernel driver has been copied to the correct location, you can load the kernel driver using the following command (or just reboot to achieve the same result):
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sudo insmod /lib/modules/3.12.28+/kernel/drivers/input/tablet/wacom.ko
Now, if you've been working from the command line, start xwindows using the startx command, and you should find that you can use your Wacom tablet as a mouse substitute!
I hope this helps someone get their Wacom tablet working on their pi!
!
