Getting stylus to work under Ubuntu

[Mark Phelps]

I've got a Fujitsu 4020 tablet PC and am running Vista on it at the moment. But I converted over to running Ubuntu 7.10 at home and have made room on the Tablet to do the same thing. I've read bunches of posts about getting tablet functions to work and have had some success by doing the following:
1) Installing setserial and wacom tools packages
2) Modifying setserial to accept stylus input
3) Copying a "rotate" script I got off a forum into /usr/local/bin
4) Modifying xorg.conf to add wacom entries -- lots of different ways!

While the good news is that I can get screen rotation to work, and get the stylus also to work, I can't get the two to work together. Once I rotate the screen, the stylus registration is way off. What I've read is that the wacomm tools package is supposed to take care of this, but it doesn't.

I know it may sound like a minor problem, but it's not. Without screen rotation, the "tablet" function is pretty much useless, and without the stylus, rotation is pretty much useless. I don't have a touch screen, so once the screen is rotated, the stylus is the only way to do anything. I haven't even tried to get the buttons on the side of the screen working.

I've seen some posts in this forum from others that have successfully
implemented Ubuntu on their tablets, so I'm hoping that someone can
help me with the rotation/stylus problem.

[pibach]

Hi Mark, welcome to Linux!
You just need to rotate the digitizer. This can be done manually: xsetwacom set stylus Rotate ccw
or by a script automatically
You can also rotate the Navdial Buttons. Here is a good howto with a script that does all this on a x60t:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=604896
Edit the keycodes according to your 4220 mappings.

Edited by: pibach

[rob_w]

Dear Mark

pibach is correct.
xsetwacom set stylus rotate ccw
should be your friend.
The precondition is that you do have input device "named" stylus and that you rotate into the correct direction.
I had setup issues on my tablets in the very beginning where my InputDevice was NOT named "stylus".
Maybe this is now untrue on latest wacom drivers but it did the trick before.

If still all is goind bad, use the wacom dump utility named
wacdump
Maybe that helps to"visualize " ( on a terminal ) how your raw wacom data looks like.
wacdump works for me by doing
wacdump -c serial -f tpc /dev/ttyS0

Regards Robert

[Mark Phelps]

pibach:

Rotating the digitizer is not a problem. I've found several different ways to do it, all of which seem to work OK.

That Ubuntu forums post is where I got the "rotate" script. That's the one I copied into /usr/local/bin and run to do the roation.

Since that script doesn't seem to set the stylus properly, should I just run the xsetwacom command instead?



Edited by: Mark Phelps

[Mark Phelps]

Rob-W:

I'll try the xsetwacom but I think I did that before and it gave me a "not found" or something like that.

I modified my xorg.conf following the advice in the Ubuntu forums post that pibach cited. That's where I got the "rotate" script from. I also found several other posts in the same forum that had other changes for xorg.conf.

Rotation works fine, it's just that the stylus is useless after rotation. I bought the tablet pc to use the stylus and that's how I have it setup most of the day. So, unless I can get the stylus to work in rotated mode, there's no point in converting over to Ubuntu.

Also, I've used the wacom dump routine to confirm that sttyS0 was the correct port for setserial. So, I've seen it work but I haven't paid a lot of attention to it.

[Mark Phelps]

OK, I rebooted into Ubuntu and tried xsetwacom -- no change.

The rotate script changes the digitizer, but the stylus then doesn't register properly. When I "unrotate" it back (typing "rotate laptop"), the mouse cursor is now off registration. Have to restart the X-server to get mouse and stylus working properly again.

The command that didn't work was "xsetpointer stylus" that I got from an Ubuntu forums post on "HOWTO: wacom on Fujitsu tablet PC for beginners". Typing that gives me a "not found".

Edited by: Mark Phelps

[pibach]

Sound like a flip issue, probably your FSC digitizer is in opposit orientation to Thinkpad's and when you rotate the screen to the left you rotate the digitizer to the right? And "laptop" orientation is upside down? Did you try to set the digitizer manually to different orientations to match that?

[Mark Phelps]

Don't know what the thinkpad does, but when I run the rotate script with "tablet", the screen rotates to the "right". By "right", I mean that the "top" of the desktop is now on the right side of the digitizer. This is the same rotation it does automatically under Windows when I manually turn the digitizer.

So, you think that the screen may be rotating one way, but the stylus is rotating the other?

By manually, you mean using the screen settings menu? The buttons on the digitizer don't work (yet), and Ubuntu doesn't autosense screen rotation, so using the rotate script or the screen settings menu is the only way I have of doing rotation.

[pibach]

By doing it "manually" I mean to type the command in a terminal. You can specify different rotations ccw, cw and none. Also you can rotate the eraser and the cursor. Once you figured out the correct command via terminal commands, you can put these in the script.

[Mark Phelps]

pibach:

It works! It works!!

Changed the xsetwacom command to rotate the stylus clockwise, and when I run the rotate script, the stylus works properly. I then reran the xsetwacom command with Rotate of "none", and when I ran the rotate script, it was set back properly.

Guess I'll start digging through the rotate script to see what I can do about embedding the xsetwacom command.

Many thanks for all your help.

Now, I can just address the minor annoyances after I change the xorg.conf file. But at least, I get tablet functionality now. Major progress!!

Edited by: Mark Phelps