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QCad Professional and Wacom Bamboo Tablet

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 4:24 am
by BillR
Since I've raised a bit of a stink about some things, I thought I'd start a thread on something which works pretty well.

I'm running Linux, Mepis 8, AMD64 (Debian based). I bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet expecting to use it with QCad, but then read (somewhere in this forum) that QCad doesn't support tablets.

Yes it does. Setting up the proper configuration in the xorg.conf takes a bit of Googling and a bit of cut and try. Once I had it working on X, I brought up QCad and it just worked -- almost.

It is very slow tracking the stylus -- doesn't lose any motions -- just falls way behind. There is a parameter which can be used in the xorg.conf file -- "supress nn" which tells the driver to ignore any movement less than nn, cutting down the number of events that QCad needs to field. It appears to work because if I set it to a large number, I can see the pointer "jump" on the screen rather than move smoothly. But, even a large number does not seem to improve QCad's response speed much if at all.

It is possible that if I were running a 64 bit version of QCad the problem might go away but I have no way to know.

In any event, it DOES work. The trick is just to lift the stylus off the pad when moving it to cut the number of events processed.

The X system and Wacom driver can be set up so that the function keys on the tablet can emulate mouse buttons but any attempt to emulate key strokes causes X to crash -- a known problem with the current version of X -- they've changed something which invalidates the way the Wacom driver has been passing events through to the application.

Anyway, I'm a pretty happy camper right now -- much faster than the touchpad on my laptop, for sure.