The DigiPro T-6000U USB Graphics Tablet provides an easy way to draw, sketch, hand write an email, annotate documents, edit digital photos and make an electronic presentation! This DigiPro T-6000U features a 6 x 4.5-inch working area, 12 macro keys, USB 1.1 interface and comes with a stylus pen that features 512 levels of pressure sensitivity. In addition, a 3-button cordless mouse is included for smooth, accurate tracking! The DigiPro T-6000U comes with Power Presenter RE, Office Ink & Free Notes software to make handwriting, drawing and presentations quick and simple!

OK, OK, I’ll do the rest of the technical stuff later most of you are just wanting to know does it compare to a Wacom, and the answer is yes. I have used both Wacom tablets and this DigiPro tablet is comparable to the Wacom tablets at least when used with Ubuntu. When I first bought this thing I hooked it up to my main box that I use for development work, I keep a fresh install of the latest Ubuntu on this box by the way, after the long road of trying to get the drivers installed (my only grip by the way but it is not tablets fault because once I got the right drivers it worked flawlessly, I would like to see these drivers included on the cd or at the least tell us this tablet uses Aiptek chipset), I opened up GIMP and began sketching away and was surprised. For those who have used Wacom tablets you are used to the heavy price included with using them, but I am here to tell you if you are like me and are on a budget the DigiPro is the way to go, no regrets at all from me. I took a chance on this tablet because of its price and at the time I bought it I paid $35.99 for the tablet, shipping and tax. You can’t beat that price and still get a quality tablet.

Now the negative stuff. For me anyway, I don’t use the macro keys and think they are a waste of space and I also think they could get in the way (accidentally getting triggered when using GIMP or other software especially when trying to close a window ), I would leave them disabled in Ubuntu and disable them on Windows, but I know somebody out there will or can find a use for them. So after having lots of success using this tablet on my Ubuntu system, I decided to install this guys on a windows installation and I wish I had just stuck to the Ubuntu install and never ventured over to windows with it. On the Windows installation I noticed significant lag and was almost sick at my stomach. I thought to my self and then I said wait maybe something is configured incorrect so I tried to fix the settings but to no avail. It did not take long to realize that this tablet is no going to have the same success on my Windows box that it had on my Linux box and what a disappointment that is, Windows fails again.

In short if you are going to use this on Linux then go ahead and purchase the guy right now, if you are going to be using Windows then be careful, you may not like the lag you are possibly going to encounter (It is a Windows problem not a hardware issue).

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!

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!