
I’ve just had a big LOL at myself today. I bought a small Bamboo Wacom tablet, brought it home and plugged into my Linux box. First impression: it’s good. Tablet was recognized as a mouse, I could move cursor and click things but, well, GIMP didn’t like it as a damn tablet. Taught by years of hacking Linux I fired up Firefox, googled for “linux wacom tablet”, found excellent Linux Wacom Project and started debugging/configuring/messing around with system settings. The problem was that everything seemed to work as expected but damn GIMP refused to treat stupid tablet as a, well, tablet. Half hour later I read about disabling something when RedHat is booted with tablet plugged in as it differently autoconfigures tablet when it’s connected before system start and when system is running. *DING!* Maybe my old habits just don’t apply to modern Linux times when things Just Work? Automagically? I rebooted (I know, I could’ve just killed X) with tablet connected and voila! everything Just Works.
Shit!
LOL!
Happiness 🙂
That happens when you’re just so used to manually configuring things that you just don’t think that free software is up to the task of applying AutoMagic(tm) and everything Just Works 😀
UPDATE (2010.05.01): Since Ubuntu 9.4 (or possibly earlier version, can’t remember) it’s not even necessary to have it connected at boot time, just Plug’n’Draw baby, anytime 🙂