Tag Archives: tablet

Ubuntu Evince with panning hand for scrolling PPA

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I use Wacom Bamboo One tablet in my every day computing and I'm very satisfied with its performance when connected to my Ubuntu PC. But one thing I miss when compared to mouse is panning hand. When using tablet it is easiest to scroll by grabbing you document up or down. But, your application must support such "panning hand" GUI interface. With Firefox i use "Grab and Drag" addon and that's about all I need from my browsing experience when it comes to scrolling with my tablet. Most of the other desktop applications do not support "panning hand" and there isn't much we can do about it except grabbing source and getting our hands dirty. IRIE Shinsuke agrees, so he patched Gnome document viewer Evince with "panning hand" patch grabbed from Evince mailing lists. This patch unfortunately hasn't been accepted for inclusion to Evince (don't know why). Fear not, IRIE is here with Ubuntu PPA for Evince with "panning hand". So read on to find out how to obtain you copy:

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Ubuntu latest Wacom tablet driver PPA

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Wacom Intuos3 A5I use tablet instead of mouse. Why? It feels more natural when compared to mouse especially after you get used to it. And freehand drawing in Gimp becomes much easier and gives better results when you replace you mouse with tablet device. The only tablet manufacturer with good Linux support (provided by the community) is Wacom. Linux Wacom driver consists of kernel module and Xorg driver. Latest Wacom kernel module and Wacom Xorg driver can be found at Linux Wacom project Sourceforge site. It is very important for me to have my tablet in top shape on my Linux PCs so I often grab latest driver from projects Git repository and go trough process of compiling it. You might have some brand new Wacom tablet without support in your current Ubuntu distribution so you should do the same. Problem is that Git repository can sometimes be in semiusefull state because, after all it is the place where development is taking place.

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Linux and Wacom tablets

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From my experience I've learned that every configuration has one or more "Linux unfriendly" hardware. Not so long ago Wacom tablets were one of those stubborn pieces of an equipment. It's true that Wacom driver existed but it wasn't included in your favorite distribution. You had to go to The Linux Wacom Project web page, and download unofficial Wacom driver in its source version. Then you had to spend a few days compiling, crunching through online documents and trough your distributions configuration files adding lines in hope that somehow it'll work.

In the recent years things began to look better for our tablets. Now almost every Linux distribution has a Wacom driver included. It may not be the newest version, but Wacom driver is very mature and in 90% of cases works just fine. So now with a driver included in your distribution you're just a few mouse clicks (keyboard clicks to be precise) away from working tablet in your Linux distribution. I will take the Ubuntu as an example...

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