I currently spend an inordinate amount of time at my home office desk, and thought I could do some doodling/sketches [e.g. while tele-conferencing], so I decided I was going to break out my Lenovo Thinkpad X201 “convertible” (it’s a pen enabled tablet/laptop, Quad i5, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD) again and keep it on my desk, in front / below my 32" - after trying out the installation of Autodesk Sketchbook x64 (it’s now FREE) via Wine (v 5) on my main desktop (the one hooked up to the 32", running Ubuntu 20.04 - upgraded from 18.04) - it installed without issues and works flawlessly.
Fresh install of xubuntu 18.04.1 (why xubuntu? well stock Ubuntu 18.04 had issues [e.g. even from “live usb” - and XFCE is what Ubuntu Studio used to use [they’ve since switched to KDE I think]), do all the updates, the Wacom Pen and touchscreen all work flawlessly… Install Wine…So I try install Sketchbook and it barfs on a bunch of things it wants (like gecko and some other crap)… I check Wine version on the desktop machine - it’s 5, but here on the tablet its 3. So I remove wine 3, add a PPA for wine 5, install wine 5, then try install Sketchbook again - same deal… so I purge wine and remove that PPA : then :
Upgrade the machine to 20.04 (do-release-upgrade -d), wait an hour+, install wine32 and wine64 and winetricks, install Autodesk Sketchbook using winetricks, it’s fine - installs no issues, runs no issues - it’s then that I discover the GODDAMN Wacom Pen and Touch features NO LONGER F__KING WORK! ARRRGH!
Here’s the symptoms - when the thing boots up - and I’m logged in - touch and pen work (for a bit), then a message “System program problem detected” pops, but unhelpfully, NO diagnostic information, so I don’t have a clue what is having a problem… then right about then, pen and touch stop working! I’ve no idea if that error message dialog is related to the Wacom stuff or not!
The only things being logged that look related to Wacom - look like “information” messages, i.e. not failures :
─➤ dmesg |grep -i wacom
[ 5.058801] input: Wacom Serial Penabled 2FG Touchscreen Pen as /devices/pnp0/00:05/tty/ttyS4/serio3/input/input15
[ 5.059143] input: Wacom Serial Penabled 2FG Touchscreen Finger as /devices/pnp0/00:05/tty/ttyS4/serio3/input/input16
See - those look like “good things”… it’s logging that they’re there, and working…
As an “aside” - I do have an ancient USB Wacom Bamboo (8/9" I think) - bought in 2004 - plugged this into the desktop machine and it worked, even the eraser end, it was plug and play (having said that - it did’t really work well in wine running Sketchbook, i.e. treated the eraser end the same as the nib end).
One really annoying thing about Sketchbook, it was originally developed by Alias (developers of Wavefront and Maya - Industrial scale 3D graphics apps used by the likes of Pixar and ILM) when it was owned by Silicon Graphics - ON - SGI’s UNIX “IRIX” (and then ported to win32 and powermac). If Autodesk could just release it on Linux I’d be happy (they do other software on Linux, like Maya, and Mudbox).
Another thing? If I let zsh cli completion finish “sudo apt install waco…” it suggests “wacomtablet” package (so it’s querying that from somewhere!) - but then I get :
─➤ sudo apt install wacomtablet
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package wacomtablet
I don’t anticipate any of you folks out there will have a solution… just griping…
Put a fair amount of work into this… but I reckon I might wipe it and re-install Ubuntu Studio 20.04… and amongst all this - I remembered one decent “infinite canvas” drawing/sketching app for Linux which was okay (minimal interface like Sketchbook) - but can’t remember the name, and it doesn’t come up on any searches, google found TWO It’sFOSS articles about drawing/painting apps, they listed Gimp, Krita, Pinta, some other Microsoft Paint Clone and Inkscape (that’s not a sketching app - I use it all the time, it’s a vector art tool like Corel and Illustrator, easier to use a mouse in it than a stylus) - but not the app I was looking for…