#244 Wacom CTH-480 does not generate any keypress apart from stylus

[Romano Giannetti]

I have a Wacom Intuos small CTH-480. Since upgrading my SO to Ubuntu 14.04 the tablet is recognized automatically, even in wireless, and it works.

The only problem is that the keys on the tablet (the four black physical keys) seems to not exist as far as the driver is concerned... or I am doing something very wrong.
If I use xsetwacom to set Buttons, it seems that only 1,2,3 (the stylus one) are recognized.

Trying to set another one with xsetwacom --set 18 Button 4 "key a" returns an error:

Unsupported offset into 'Wacom Button Actions' property.

I tried all other devices too. My tablet has

[:~] % xsetwacom --list                   
Wacom Intuos PT S (WL) Pen stylus   id: 15  type: STYLUS    
Wacom Intuos PT S (WL) Pen eraser   id: 16  type: ERASER    
Wacom Intuos PT S (WL) Finger touch id: 17  type: TOUCH     
Wacom Intuos PT S (WL) Finger pad   id: 18  type: PAD

When using xev, clicking on any of the four buttons give nothing.

Is this an operator error or what? Should I someway " enable" them? Thanks!

[Romano Giannetti]

Ok, I discovered (by trial and error) that the buttons do exist on device 18, and they are

Button +3      Button +9 
Button +1      Button +8

The "+" was escaping me.

Is there a way to ask to the tablet where the buttons are, short of trying blindly? BTW, it seems that I have a button +2 somewhere too, although I can't physically associate it.

[Jason Gerecke]

Using the buttons on tablets from the Bamboo family (including the Intuos non-Pro) is known to be problematic under GNOME. GNOME does not expect there to be gaps in the the button sequence, which is only the case for the professional tablet lines. I've attached a script which allows you to both discover the button numbers present as well as re-map them in a way that GNOME can understand. After running it, the Wacom Tablet panel of the Settings application should work better. You'll need to be sure to run the output xsetwacom commands any time you login though.

Just in case you're interested: the reason xev did not see any events is that the gnome-settings-daemon process grabs the pad device and prevents other applications from seeing its events. Buttons 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are "missing" because our driver tries to have the buttons perform sensible actions by default (left-click [1], right-click [3], navigate-back [8], navigate-forward [9]). Our driver skips buttons 4-7 for every tablet and is able to provide appropriate feedback in xsetwacom about them being an "Unsupported offset", but button 2 is not always skipped and so no such message is yet printed.

[Romano Giannetti]

OK - now I see.
After running the script and the xsetwacom thing I have still problem in finding the buttons in the gnome settings center - but I suppose that is another problem.
One small thing, probably unrelated. I move the tablet a lot among computers; so I would need to run the xsetwacom script when the tablet is connected, not at login or boot. IS there a simple way of doing it?
And a last thing about the script --- I think that the Id of the four devices changes between reboots, so maybe it would be better to use the device name in the output script --- am I correct?
Thank you a lot --- I have a much better tablet now!

[Jason Gerecke]

Yes, that is possible. Please try the updated attached script. It now uses the device name rather than the ID (good suggestion :)) and added a new bit at the end which produces an auto-configuration snippet. Its somewhat fragile due to the convoluted nature of how buttons are processed by our driver, but should work fine provided you only use the control center to do further button mapping (xsetwacom may not work as expected with the snippet in place).