Ubuntu DIGIPRO T-8000U T-6000U T-5500U 12000U 14000U
September 5, 2009 by: Allen Sanford
OK, I recently purchased a DigiPro T-6000U Graphics Tablet to use with Ubuntu (More Specifically Jaunty Jackalope or AKA 9.04) and it took me a while to figure out how to get it working, but as I found out in the end it is way easier than I thought to get it working, and I was trying to “over do it”. My biggest problem was that not to many people were sharing the information about installing a DigiPro but rather they were sharing how to install an Aiptek graphic’s tablet. The reason for this was not at first apparent but DigiPro tablets are using Aiptek hardware, and you can see this by running the following two commands with the tablet plugged in, (When you run the commands without the tablet plugged in you will notice you will not find Aiptek in the list unless you have other Aiptek hardware).
grep -i name /proc/bus/input/devices lshal | grep Aiptek |
The following information is for installing aiptek-based USB tablets for Linux and X11, not to be confused with the older serial-based hyper pen module. This tablet is also known as a Dolphin, Medion (Aldi tablet), Nisis and a few other generic brands.
The xserver-xorg-input-aiptek package must be installed to use this tablet, this is where I ran into my biggest troubles. I keep trying to install wizardpen drivers because all my searches for Ubuntu and DigiPro were leading me to results that linked to wizardpen drivers instructions, hence why I am writing this. To install run the following command.
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-aiptek |
Support for the Aiptek tablet has improved a tremendous amount in a short time since Ubuntu 8.04. One of the more confusing things is setting the correct configuration setup for HAL. The settings for the tablet are now stored with HAL, and no longer requires one to have to edit the xorg.conf file. The following will fix you up; create a file named 10-aiptek.fdi, in the directory /etc/hal/fdi/policy with the following content (make note if your tablet has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity use 1023 instead of 511):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true </merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.USB" type="string">On</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMin" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMax" type="string">511</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.KeepShape" type="string">On</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo> |
All you need to do now is to restart udev and xorg or for simplicity just reboot, for newbies I recommend rebooting just to be safe.
Now most people will be using their tablets to draw in GIMP but almost everyone will notice that if they try and use it now the 512/1024 pressure sensitive feature will not be working, not to worry this is a GIMP configuration problem. To configure GIMP to use the pressure sensitive feature navigate here in the menus Edit >> Preferences >> Input Devices >> Configure Extended Input Devices … Now you need set the mode to either window or screen I screen but the choice is yours. Save your settings and restart GIMP for good measure and off you go.
Some tablets (6000U, 12000U, 14000U) seems to use Wacom drivers, if you experience problems with button presses (Your mouse pointer freezes), but you can move the cursor try the updated packets for Wacom.
(I think I’ll write a review on this tablet too I like it a lot)
Enjoy and Have a Good’n!
Thanks for this awesome write-up. It worked perfectly and my daughter is playing with TuxPaint right now!
I have an “Aiptek T-8000U” and tried to get it running following your tutorial, but I get an error in dmesg:
[55720.222634] aiptek 2-5:1.0: Aiptek tried all speeds, no sane response
[55720.222679] aiptek: probe of 2-5:1.0 failed with error -12
Any idea why that is the case or how I can fix it?
If you need more information… please let me know!
Greetings from Austria,
Eraldo
I sweated the thick end of a week to get mine working in Ubuntu 9.10. Have a read of the sourceforge site http://aiptektablet.sourceforge.net/kernel.html. I had to add aiptek to /etc/modules, create the hal policy file (as above). That still didn’t work. I finally had to program the driver:
echo pencil > tool_mode
echo something > execute
I this in a rc.d file.
I swear to the gods, I will _NEVER_ buy another Aiptek graphics tablet to work with Linux again, This thing is so flakey. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Latest is that I don’t need an entry in /etc/modules, but I need to do some extra programming. Here’s my rc.d file:
#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
start)
for EXEC_FILE in /sys/bus/usb/drivers/aiptek/*/execute
do
DIR_NAME=`dirname $EXEC_FILE`
echo -n “Setting Up Aiptek $DIR_NAME ”
logger “Setting Up Aiptek $DIR_NAME”
echo “relative” > $DIR_NAME/coordinate_mode
echo “anything” > $DIR_NAME/execute
echo -n “.”
echo “absolute” > $DIR_NAME/coordinate_mode
echo “anything” > $DIR_NAME/execute
echo -n “.”
echo “pencil” > $DIR_NAME/tool_mode
echo “anything” > $DIR_NAME/execute
echo -n “.”
echo “”
done
;;
stop) ;;
status) ;;
restart) ;;
force-reload) ;;
*)
echo “Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start}” >&2
exit 3
;;
esac