Christmas has always meant meeting with the family, laughing, telling stories, eating and drinking. But Christmas without a succession of gifts exchanges wouldn’t really be Christmas. One of the gifts I was offered this year was the new Wacom Bamboo graphic tablet, a piece of equipment that was still missing around my computer. Of course, before buying it on behalf of my grandma, I googled a bit to verify whether it was decently supported under Linux or not. Of course it was, and here is what you have to do to use it under Ubuntu:

First of all, download the latest linuxwacom package from their website. The Bamboo is only supported from release 0.7.8-3 (the latest one at the time of writing this). The next step is to build the kernel module:

With some luck, this will work from the first attempt, but you’ll most probably be missing some dependencies (mostly libraries).

In my case, I had to install the following development packages:

You’ll maybe need more than this, but simply check the output of the configure command (here above) to see what’s missing on your system. Once it’s installed, retry to compile the module.

After some time, you should find a “wacom.ko” file in the “src/2.6.19/” subdirectory. Actually, this is the kernel module we just built. To make sure everything is ok, you may want to try loading the module into the kernel. To do this, perform:

and check the /var/log/messages logfile for any errors. If everything went smooth, you can replace the default wacom.ko module (not supporting the bamboo) by the freshly compiled one:

Finally, you’ll have to modify your Xorg configuration file so that it recognizes the tablet:

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver		"wacom"
	Identifier	"stylus"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
	Option		"Type"	"stylus"
	Option        	"USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
	Option		"ForceDevice"	"ISDV4"        # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver		"wacom"
	Identifier	"eraser"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
	Option		"Type"	"eraser"
	Option        	"USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
	Option		"ForceDevice"	"ISDV4"        # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver		"wacom"
	Identifier	"cursor"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
	Option		"Type"	"cursor"
	Option        "USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
	Option		"ForceDevice"	"ISDV4"      # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  	Driver        "wacom"
  	Identifier    "pad"
	Option		"Device"	"/dev/input/wacom"
  	Option        "Type"          "pad"
  	Option        "USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
EndSection

Save and exit, and reboot. Your shiny new tablet should be recognized and working perfectly. You can test the pressure sensitivity with Gimp and start drawing! Don’t forget to check the Linux Wacom Project Howto if you need more help!