First of all, you should have a tablet, of course.
The following Wacom tablets are supported:
ArtZ II series (known in Europe as the UltraPad series -
the same UltraPad name also was used for earlier tablets that only work
partially.)
ArtPad II
PL300 (combined LCD screen and tablet)
Pen Partner
Graphire alias FAVO (mouse and pen, get at least the alpha 16 driver for full
support from
http://www.lepied.com/xfree86/).
Intuos series (support may be only partial with the driver of your
distribution, get updated alpha versions from
Frederic Lepied's page:
http://www.lepied.com/xfree86/)
The older SD and HD series are not supported by the standard XFree86 driver,
however, a modified driver that supports these devices as well some OEM
products with embedded screens including the IBM Thinkpad 360 PE and Toshiba
T200 is available from:
http://hwr.nici.kun.nl/pen-computing/pen-computing-formats.html
If you want support for the linux console, get the latest version of gpm from
ftp://ftp.prosa.it/pub/gpm
or from
ftp://animal.unipv.it/pub/gpm
(mirror)
If you want support for XFree86, use at least version 3.3.3.1 or get the latest
from
http://www.xfree.org
For the linux console, the only program I know is gpm.
For XFree, the keyword is XInput. This specification has to be supported by
device drivers which provide extra information. In turn, XInput has to be
understood by programs which want to use alternative pointer devices.
There is a big number of programs based on the gtk library. The gtk has XInput
support and makes it very easy to use.
At least the following applications support XInput:
The Gimp - a powerful image manipulation program in the style of Photoshop. The
1.1.x instable development version includes XInput support as a standard
feature. We are awaiting the next stable release, Version 1.2.x.
Obtain Gimp from
http://www.gimp.org
, it really deserves it !
I am sure most of you know this and it was the reason to buy a tablet.
gsumi - a simple B/W drawing program that supports drawing / erasing with
pressure and tilt sensitivity.
Get it from the gsumi web page:
http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gsumi/
xink (By Ralph Levien) - another rudimentary drawing program for X.
xink is available from:
ftp://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/raph/xink.tar.gz
RasMol - a molecular visualization program that supports a hardware dial box
using XInput. look at
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/distrib/rasman.htm
.
xinput (by Frederic Lepied) - a very useful utility for configuring and testing
XInput devices.
xinput is available from:
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz