Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/03/06/fixed-i-got-my-new-wacom-bamboo-pen-056a-00d4-ctl-460-working-in-ubuntu/

It has been a long, terrible and unhappy time with my beautiful friendly little graphics tablet refusing to work, and it’s great to have it back.

My problems all started when my Windows machine died.
My graphics tablet, of course, has a Windows driver that came with it on a disk. It wasn’t perfect and I would have to hunt out the CD Rom to reinstall the driver every single time I switched off the computer, but it worked, mostly. But with that computer dead, that wasn’t an option.
I was saved, and reconnected to the information super-highway by a very kind friend. They gave me a laptop that had had its insides wiped after a virus attack, all that was left on it was the Bios, the short program that lives on a chip inside somewhere and tells it how to boot up.
But unfortunately I couldn’t just put XP on this new machine without paying a lot of money.

I did know that there was an alternative that wouldn’t cost any money though, drum roll… Linux… screams of terror.
Linux has a reputation of being a bit tricky, a reputation that you have to be an absolute nerd to get anywhere with it, and as far as my experiences went, this reputation seems to be absolutely deserved.

I installed Puppy Linux, that makes it sound too easy though, what I actually did was trash my computer’s long-suffering hard disk about twenty times trying to make the right partitions before Puppy Linux finally installed.

I installed Puppy Linux, but my cool little Bamboo graphics tablet wouldn’t work, it’s a new one and the drivers have only just been written. I moved from one version of Linux to another, Linux people call the different versions distros, looking for one that contained the drivers that would get my graphics pad working. In the end I tried Puppy Linux, Open Suse, Slitaz, Slax and Mandriva without any luck. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu and everything clicked into place. I found a forum thread where a giant team of people were working on getting these new Wacom Graphics tablets working with Linux, and after following the instructions in this great and easy to follow post my Bamboo Pen tablet simply sprung to life.

I’m so happy I can hardly even think straight.