I've googled for this and found next to nothing. I also tried to read through the code but it's not clear to me what's supposed to happen. I get the feeling few people have tried to go this far with the tablets.

How do you use the Configure Extended Input Devices dialog? The Bamboo is recognized by xorg without any xorg.conf settings, but you have to add some stuff to get the pad and eraser to be seen. That much appears to be working. I can see the X events with xev for the four buttons and circular pad. BTW, the drawing area on the Bamboo and the stylus work just fine - pressure works great and the tool respond as expected. But just for the stylus and drawing area. I'm now trying to figure out how to get the eraser, extra buttons and circular pad to do something useful.

In the Configure Input Devices dialog I select a device, say the Eraser. I set the Mode to either Window or Screen. The purpose of the Axes tab is not clear. There is a mapping of available axis' to a number, but there isn't anything that says what these numbers are for.

The keys tab would appear to be what I use to map the X buttons (what xev says the button is reported as) to keyboard shortcuts in GIMP. So, on the bamboo the buttons are arranged in a square around a circular pad. The upper left button maps to X Button 9, lower left button to 10, upper right to 11 and lower right to 12. The circular pad generates events and acts like a scroll wheel in the Configure Input Devices window.

Setting "Shift-E" for key 9 seems like it would map the Eraser to the upper left button. But that doesn't happen. Setting any keystroke combination in the keys fields doesn't seem to do anything. Every time I hit a button it seems to do the same thing (go back to a particular brush).

Trying to scroll in the GIMP image window (when zoomed in) with the circular pad doesn't do anything either.

And the Eraser Device is just mapped as another tool, essentially acting like a second stylus.

I've discovered that the stylus and eraser remember the last tool they were used as - if I'm using the Eraser device and choose the Eraser tool, then switch to the stylus (as a paintbrush, for example) and then switch back to the Erase device I'm back to the GIMP Eraser. Is this the intended action for these devices - just remember the last tool they were used as?

Also, what are the Axes and Keys mapping for me? What do the Axes numbers mean and what do the numbered keys map to?

FYI, here are the relevant portions of my xorg.conf settings:

Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" # Uncomment if you have a wacom tablet InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents" InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents" InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents" InputDevice "pad" "SendCoreEvents" EndSection

Section "InputDevice" Driver "wacom"
Identifier "stylus"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" Option "Type" "stylus" Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice" Driver "wacom"
Identifier "eraser"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" Option "Type" "eraser" Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice" Driver "wacom"
Identifier "cursor"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" Option "Type" "cursor" Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

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

On Sun, 2009-04-05 at 16:33 -0600, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

How do you use the Configure Extended Input Devices dialog? The Bamboo is recognized by xorg without any xorg.conf settings, but you have to add some stuff to get the pad and eraser to be seen. That much appears to be working. I can see the X events with xev for the four buttons and circular pad. BTW, the drawing area on the Bamboo and the stylus work just fine - pressure works great and the tool respond as expected. But just for the stylus and drawing area. I'm now trying to figure out how to get the eraser, extra buttons and circular pad to do something useful.

Followup:

The wacomcpl tool allows mapping the buttons and circular pad to GIMP events by making them look like key presses from the keyboard (it will also allow you to make them act like mouse buttons). Unfortunately wacomcpl isn't available for Fedora 10, so you have to build it manually from the wacom source distribution. For other googlers of this thread: grab tk-devel and tcl-devel to build this tool, and you don't really care if anything else gets built. The current X.org and kernel drivers seem to work fine in F10.

So the Bamboo works fine now under GIMP. But I'm still curious as to the purpose of the Axes and Keys tabs in the Configure Input Devices dialog. Does anyone know what those are supposed to be used for?