Wacom Bamboo for the Ubuntu user
I sense an emerging theme on this blog being my escapades of buying a piece of hardware and then spending a week getting it to work in linux without any compiling. My latest aquesition is a Wacom Bamboo tablet and I am really pleased with it.
Tablets in general
I have owned two tablets in the past, the first was a £20 model my mother got which I ended up using mostly, it connected with both a PS/2 and serial connector and, at the time, I thought it was the bee’s knees. My next tablet was not such a good choice. It was a generic “Trust TB-4200″ and, as I later realized, far too big. It now sits next to the printer doing nothing.
Features
The Bamboo now has pride of place sat next to my laptop (where it is also serving to keep away the junk and clutter trying to occupy the same space) and offers a really simple way to get my drawing on. The size is pretty much perfect; As I had learned with the TB-4200, smaller tends towards better. The drawing area on the Bamboo is roughly A6 in size but with 4:3 proportions to match a standard width monitor.
The pen is comfortable and, while a bit light, well balanced. The tablet itself has four buttons (more on what I use them for later) and an interesting scroll circle thing which, while clever in theory, doesn’t quite pull it off in practice as it is hard to use with the pen (though a finger seems to work fine).
The Ubunu Bamboo experience
Using windows XP with the latest drivers as a control, the handling works very well. The size I chose offers the ideal combination of detail and ease when I need to quickly reach all sides of the screen. One thing that strikes me as very odd is that in both Windows and Ubuntu I ended up unable to use the GIMP due to a really annoying lag between me drawing and the mark appearing. The problem is that this really snookers me when it comes to graphical applications. Either I use Inkscape (which is quite possible) or find a way to install photoshop CS3 in wine.
I have found a cool application called Xournal, a note taking and doodling program for linux but no reall graphics program. It looks like I’m going to need to do some searching on this one..
