Fedora 12 rocks on tablets
(That’s Fedora 12 Beta’s Inkscape on my Thinkpad x61 with a built-in Wacom digitizer in the photo. Photo credit David Aquilina, CC-BY-3.0)
Got a tablet, or want to get one, but not sure it’s going to work out in Linux? Here’s how my Thinkpad x61’s built-in Wacom tablet works in Fedora 12 Beta:
- Tablet pressure sensitivity out-of-the-box, no xorg.conf needed! (Well okay, so that’s been the case for a couple Fedora releases now
) - Cellwriter provides handwriting recognition text input (no more having to flip the tablet back to keyboard mode just for one stupid little thing.)
- Xournal is great for taking notes & signing documents. No more print, sign, and re-scan; I can just sign emailed digital documents on screen and email them right back.
- Gimp brush dynamics effects rock – they’re the secret to achieve quite a few of the effects in the Fedora 12 wallpaper designs.
- The new Inkscape in Fedora 12 has a cool new feature that allows you to create your own brushes and save them or choose from a collection of preset brushes.
Fedora is truly committed to software freedom. Enjoy great features like this without the guilt. Try Fedora 12 RC3 today. Or wait until Fedora 12 final comes out:
Please download http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/12-RC.3/ instead of beta. Beta is too old and has many known bugs fixed in the latest release candidate.
Cool I updated the link!
I think RC4 is now available, but the site is fairly bandwidth limited; there shouldn’t be much functional difference between RC3 and RC4 for most users.
[...] Fedora 12 rocks on tablets « Máirín Duffy a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
Wow, I know what I want for christmas
Didn’t even know such a thing existed!
It’s amazing – highly recommended
Does F12 have a tool which enables the rotation of the screen and tablet together? So that when you flip the screen round (as it looks like you have in that photo) it turns the screen upside down (manually or automatically) and also rotates/flips the wacom tablet too?
You can set that up (depending on your hardware, if it has the sensor required or not) but unfortunately F12 doesn’t do that out-of-the box. We do have a display settings applet that can be docked in the tray area that has a little dropdown that allows you to rotate the screen how you like.
Yeah, Ubuntu is the same in that regard. We really need to fix that.
@Alan I wonder how you detect it though; my understanding is that the tablet hardware doesn’t have a standardized way of doing it.
Not sure if you can detect the rotation of the tablet, but I’m less bothered about detecting. I’m more interested in making sure the display and tablet are in sync. So if someone chooses left, right or inverted from the display panel doofer they get a rotated display and tablet together.
As I understand it “xinput list” tells us whether we have a tablet at all. I have seen scripted versions of this which use both “xrandr” and “xsetwacom” together. Would be nice to put a GUI on that though.
@Alan ah okay. I think it would be slick if you rotated it for it to detect that and automagically rotate the screen but your point about aligning screen and tablet position is certainly more practical.
I used to have a script to do it, but it wasn’t worth the trouble – I don’t actually tend to turn my screen. I see how it would be quite useful though and a GUI tool to do it would be great progress.
Fedora includes binary-blob firmware for wireless drivers:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/FirmWare
Best remove them if you’re truly committed to freedom.
I wonder why you post anonymously. It’s interesting.
It’s true that there is some binary blob wireless firmware in Fedora. However, you’ll note on the very page you linked to that the only ones included are licensed as being freely redistributable. So you won’t have to worry about being in trouble with the law for using them.
So freedom to distribute is the critical freedom for Fedora?
@JB I don’t know that it’s *the* critical freedom for Fedora. It certainly is a very important one for ME as a Fedora user. I occasionally do freelance artwork for clients and I definitely enjoy being able to hand them a functional live CD or bootable USB stick with the source files for their artwork, all the fonts (I only design with freely licensed, re-distributable fonts), and the software I used to make the designs so if I get hit by a bus or if they want to make some mods to the artwork they are free to do so without shelling out any more cash or having to reinstall their own machines or worry about buying licenses for fonts and all the rest.
Please don’t start this again… only because the firmware is on your harddisk rather than in some flash/rom chip does not make it any different.
That being said firmware is considered as part of the hardware.
OpenSuse is the most epic fail with my tablet pc.
Ubuntu is ok with it, but the stylus button doesn’t right click, which fucking sucks, I was fucking way off better editing config lines.
So does the button on the stylus right clicks on Fedora 12?
By default, the stylus button on my x61 does a middle click (I actually quite like this as it allows me to pan around a drawing in inkscape with the pen without the tedium of interacting with the scrollbars.)
However, if you’d like it to be mapped to right click it’s one command:
xinput set-button-map ‘Wacom Serial Tablet PC Pen Tablet/Digitizer’ 1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
(replace the Wacom device name with the name of your stylus device, available at xinput –list)
Do you think right click would be a better default?
Thanks for the info, but it would probably need to be a start-up command as far as I recall, because after each restart and such, it gets back to the defaults.
Panning is cool, maybe it’s just me, but in more apps I find right click way more useful than middle one….
The issue I think it was that in Ubuntu it was left clicking for me. Middle click seems quite cool :3
I think we should build a UI to set these preferences. I can see how right-click would be useful for someone, but I enjoy my middle-click. It should also make sure the preferences are sticky (and I didn’t realize when I gave you that command that it wasn’t persistent, so I apologize for that.)
This looks very nice. Fedora is sweet! I’ve been dying to get my hands on an AlwaysInnovating touchbook. It’s got an ARM processor though, so it might get a little tricky installing Fedora on it.
Neat. I remember when my IBM Thinkpad X41t’s tablet worked out of the box in F11. Now it doesn’t, and X crashes when using compiz or opening System Tools. I guess that’s the upgrade cycle. (Appropriate bugs filed.)
Hi Richard, i can’t say I’ve had the same problem with my x61 and I’m sure the technology is very similar to your x41. Actually, I used to get crashes in F10 when I first installed it, and the reason was that I had my old xorg.conf file – when I removed xorg.conf completely it worked wonderfully. I didn’t know I didn’t need it anymore so when I backed up my HDD from backup after installing I copied it over.
You should absolutely file bugs.
That looks awesome, Máirín!
If I remember correctly, you can speak some Japanese so you may be interested in http://tegaki.org/.
Hi Mathieu! Thanks for the pointer! Actually Warren Togami showed this to me recently and I totally forgot about it – I definitely need to try it. Thanks for the reminder
Kakko ii app sou desu ne – Arigatou gozaimasu!
[...] Fedora 12 rocks on tablets « Máirín Duffy a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
Very cool. I’ve been wondering about Fedora and tablets. That looks awesome.
Thanks for sharing!
Lately I was quite busy and din’t got time for drawing, I wonder if having such a tablet would make me draw more – it my not be so, I don’t like drawing on the old Wacom I have, but instant on-screen coordination is something much better.
It’s definitely got me drawing more. And it makes it a lot faster to do a lot of the things I normally do in Inkscape anyway.
[...] Fedora 12 rocks on tablets « Máirín Duffy [...]
[...] Fedora 12 rocks on tablets Got a tablet, or want to get one, but not sure it’s going to work out in Linux? Here’s how my Thinkpad x61’s built-in Wacom tablet works in Fedora 12 Beta: [...]
[...] demuestran las pruebas que ha realizado un usuario en su Lenovo ThinkPad X61, que dispone de una pantalla digitalizadora de Wacom integrada [...]
[...] demuestran las pruebas que ha realizado un usuario en su Lenovo ThinkPad X61, que dispone de una pantalla digitalizadora de Wacom integrada [...]
[...] demuestran las pruebas que ha realizado un usuario en su Lenovo ThinkPad X61, que dispone de una pantalla digitalizadora de Wacom integrada [...]
Hi Máirín,
I’m curious, but what’s the refresh delay like with the tablets in Fedora? I mean like, if I were to draw a line, is there a delay between what’s drawn on the screen and what I’m actually drawing?
–John Hanauer, a random Fedora Planet reader
If there is one, it isn’t perceptible to me!
[...] demuestran las pruebas que ha realizado un usuario en su Lenovo ThinkPad X61, que dispone de una pantalla digitalizadora de Wacom integrada [...]
Kaio showed me today MyPaint, which has a much better feeling for drawing raster sketches with the tablet than GIMP. Is a very nice little app.