Anyone use a Wacom tablet?

Mrock4

Hey guys. Picked up a Wacom bamboo at a good price to use for online training eventually. Just trying to get familiar with it (and get it up and running on ubuntu..works fine on our windows vista laptop). Does anyone use one of the wacom's? I know traditionally they're used by artists and people in general who need to actually draw..not so much for diagrams and such, but I thought it'd be a great asset to giving live (or recorded for that matter) training..would be much easier to literally point to certain parts of the screen. My question is, how does the wacom interact with say, webex, or one of the other training options? Do you just share your screen out and the wacom's own software highlights/writes..or do I need to have it interact with powerpoint somehow?

Just trying to get a lead in the right direction. I'm in the middle of upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 to enable hotplugging support versus modifying my xorg file. Once that's done I may find the answer on my own, but I was just curious if there was a lot of wacom users here or not.

Thanks guys.

excalibur1814

I've used LOTS of wacom tablet enabled laptops but only with Windows whcih won't help much SOrry

Mrock4

excalibur1814 wrote: »

I've used LOTS of wacom tablet enabled laptops but only with Windows whcih won't help much SOrry

It's OK, turns out the Wacom + Ubuntu was a HUGE pain. Like many things linux, if I had this version of this, and this version of that, it "should" work, but only if you make "a few" modifications of various files. I tried as best as I can, but it was still a no-go. I suspect I probably wasn't far off, but decided to not mess with it. Unplugged it, plugged into our windows laptop and it worked, so I decided when I do my class I'll use the windows laptop..

phoeneous

When I worked for the UFC, I supported our graphics department that used them with windows and mac boxes. They worked just like mice. Nothing in linux though, sorry.

undomiel

I've got an Intuos 3 and absolutely love it. They're extremely handy for pretty much anything that would involve some drawing of some sort. It is a bit of a pain under Linux though. Sometimes it would work great out of the box, and other times would require much xorg tweaking. I could never get everything working exactly the way I wanted it and it would always require config tweaking. But I did get it working good enough. Never tried it under Ubuntu but had it working under OpenSUSE and CentOS. It is definitely one of those things that is much easier to use under Windows I am sorry to report.

Mrock4

undomiel wrote: »

I've got an Intuos 3 and absolutely love it. They're extremely handy for pretty much anything that would involve some drawing of some sort. It is a bit of a pain under Linux though. Sometimes it would work great out of the box, and other times would require much xorg tweaking. I could never get everything working exactly the way I wanted it and it would always require config tweaking. But I did get it working good enough. Never tried it under Ubuntu but had it working under OpenSUSE and CentOS. It is definitely one of those things that is much easier to use under Windows I am sorry to report.

Thanks for the replies guys. I love Ubuntu, and have been ecstatic about successfully making the switch from using Windows XP as my primary OS to Ubuntu- BUT...situations like these show exactly why IMO it's best to have one (separate) system running Linux AND a windows box. In our case we have a windows laptop and the ubuntu desktop. I just don't have time to troubleshoot the Wacom forever...

Anyway, yeah, I configured xorg and such, but it just seemed to not want to detect my pad. I even started with a fresh xorg, which was a pain with my dual monitors, since I had to reconfigure it...all I have to say is thank god for nvidia-settings..configuring xorg through there is 10x easier than manually doing it.

Guess I'll just settle with the laptop. I wanted dual monitors so I could keep notes up or other terminal sessions on one screen while giving the class, but I'll make it work with one, not a big deal.

Thanks again guys

[Deleted User]

I've been looking at getting a bamboo for simple note taking, if I pick one up I will let you know how I like it. I have several friends who use them and like them very much.

chrisone

I used the wacom tablet when i was doing graphic design many moons ago lol I dont see how this will interact or help you with studying IT stuff?