I have always been keen on getting one of those stylus+touchpad combos and because of my 8-year-old son’s need to be able to draw pictures for a book he wants to publish, I finally bit the bullet and acquired a S$30 product form Genius. It is the Genius G-Pen 340 (3 inch by 4 inch, hence the 340) USB device. It has a cordless stylus and the touchpad connects via USB. I looked up for info on how to set up this on F8 and F9 and found that a driver called “wizardpen”. Followed the installation and the readme that came with the RPM and viola, all’s worked.

This is my set up currently:
a) In /etc/X11/xorg.conf (the relevant sections):

     Section "ServerLayout"
            Identifier     "Default Layout"
            Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
            InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
            InputDevice "WizardPen Tablet" "AlwaysCore"
     EndSection
 
     Section "InputDevice"
            Identifier      "WizardPen Tablet"
            Driver          "wizardpen"
            Option          "Device"        "/dev/input/wizardpen"
            Option          "TopX"          "532"
            Option          "TopY"          "1097"
            Option          "BottomX"       "32745"
            Option          "BottomY"       "32760"
            Option          "MaxX"          "32745"
            Option          "MaxY"          "32760"
     EndSection

b) the “InputDevice” section above has details that were generated from a program called: /usr/bin/wizardpen-calibrate. In order to run that program you need to find out where the USB device actually gets into the input device chain. Fortunately, that detail is nicely discovered by the udev rules that were included in the RPM above and so all you need to do is to run (as root), /usr/bin/wizardpen-calibrate /dev/input/wizardpen, which will generate something like this:

     Please, press the stilus at ANY
     corner of your desired working area: ok, got 532,1097

     Please, press the stilus at OPPOSITE
     corner of your desired working area: ok, got 32745,32760

     According to your input you may put following
     lines into your XF86Config file:

            Driver          "wizardpen"
            Option          "Device"        "/dev/input/wizardpen"
            Option          "TopX"          "532"
            Option          "TopY"          "1097"
            Option          "BottomX"       "32745"
            Option          "BottomY"       "32760"
            Option          "MaxX"          "32745"
            Option          "MaxY"          "32760"

So, you then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and as shown in a) above, add the line “InputDevice “WizardPen Tablet” “AlwaysCore” in the ServerLayout section and create a new section for the InputDevice as above.

c) Final step is to logout from X and re-login (or ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X).

This was the relevant output in /var/log/messages when the tablet was plugged in:

Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: USB disconnect, address 11
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 12
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: input: UC-LOGIC Tablet WP4030U as /class/input/input16
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: input,hiddev96,hidraw2: USB HID v1.00 Mouse [UC-LOGIC Tablet WP4030U] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=5543, idProduct=0003
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: Product: Tablet WP4030U
Oct 1 23:11:45 qbic kernel: usb 3-2: Manufacturer: UC-LOGIC

Tested out the setup with Gimp and other drawing tools, I must say that it is quite cool to have handwriting as input! Kudos to the developers.