[Linuxwacom-discuss] Suprious inputs from my Wacom ArtZ II (UD-1212) serial tablet

[Daniel N. <bm...@bl...>]

G'day! Is there any way to make the Wacom ArtZ II (UD-1212) serial
tablet work properly under Ubuntu? I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 at the
moment.

It works fine except that it generates from time to time in the
order of seconds to minutes, spurious click events at full force
and often drags the pointer to the edge of the screen. Even using
The GIMP just to scale an image is a race to complete the operation
before a spurious event mars the image.

The spurious inputs do not occur when I'm running Windows on the
same machine, so it seems unlikely to be a hardware fault.

Some of the spurious inputs do things I can't work out how to
emulate with any stylus motion, tapping or side button clicks.
I wonder if it's some event processing bug outside of the scope
of the Linux Wacom driver.

Oddly, the spurious inputs are suppressed when I run xidump.
I was considering running that continuously as a background
task, but it doesn't seem to want to run forever.

wacdump does report some errors, though:

20:14:14.570 INFO: Opening log
20:14:14.570 INFO: Setting baud rate to 38400
20:14:14.570 INFO: Sending reset
20:14:14.896 INFO: Setting baud rate to 19200
20:14:14.896 INFO: Sending reset
20:14:14.221 INFO: Setting baud rate to 9600
20:14:14.221 INFO: Sending reset
20:14:14.732 ERROR: LOBIT FAIL
20:14:14.733 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 7 bytes
20:14:14.412 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 1 bytes
20:14:14.420 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 1 bytes
20:14:14.308 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 1 bytes
20:14:14.316 ERROR: LOBIT FAIL
20:14:14.316 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 5 bytes
20:14:14.328 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 3 bytes
20:14:14.940 WARN: Bad high bit, discarding 1 bytes
...

...and generates a storm of spurious events, possibly
because it fights with the OS during the dump.

I was hoping for Ubuntu 9.10 to have some means of supporting the
serial tablet directly. I gather it's all a bit of a mess at the
moment with Xorg going out of fashion and then FDL files also being
phased out in favour of Powerkit.

It's a shame that I can't use in Linux a tablet I've been using for
more than ten years. It's built to last, rather like the Model M
keyboard on my desk.

Any ideas how I could further diagnose and perhaps fix the problem?

-- 
Daniel Neville, bm...@bl...