Wacom Volito2 Tablet & Pen Review
Monday, February 5th, 2007
I recently decided to have a go at some freehand art on my PC. I’ve been “manipulating” images using The GIMP software for years, and I’ve always been into drawing on paper, but I’ve never combined the two. So, I read some reviews and bought myself a Wacom Volito2 from amazon for the paultry dum of £27 (free delivery). This is an absolute bargain for a tablet from such as highly regarded manufacturer which uses the same technology as their much more expensive models.
The reason it’s to cheap is because it’s only A6. While this sounds very small, in practice you hardly notice. I’ve been very impressed with the performance of the tablet – it works very well, especially when used with The GIMP. I’m still learning to use it properly, but I’m already impressed with some of the results.
The only downside is that support for the tablet in Ubuntu Edgy is “broken”. It’s not recognised by the stock kernel. However, this was fairly easily rectified by compiling the kernel drivers available from the Wacom site. I haven’t got the exact procedure required to do this as I already had the kernel headers and such installed on my machine. However, here are a few useful links on the subject:
Get the module from: http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/dl
The version I downloaded was: linuxwacom-0.7.2.tar.bz2
Compile against the headers for your kernel.
The new wacom module lives in:
/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-386/kernel/drivers/usb/input/wacon.ko
I have a ready-done module for the 2.6.17-10-386 Edgy kernel here: wacom.ko