retitle 587174 old (external) serial tablets not currently supported
severity 587174 wishlist
thanks


Hi,

Unfortunately, the short answer is that what you want to do isn't
going to work at present, and some of it never can, but there are
a few reasons that come together to make that so.

 - You're never going to be able to have 'hotplug' support for this
   tablet.  That's only possible for 'real' USB tablets or for those
   that are integrated with the system (like tablet PCs).  The USB
   adapter dongle you have just provides a generic serial port, so
   there is no way to know that is (connected to) a tablet.

 - In theory, you should still be able to manually configure xorg to
   use this tablet, by telling it the tablet is on ttyUSB0 rather
   than ttyS0 as you would have previously -- except the old serial
   tablets use a different protocol to the newer (post USB) ones,
   and support for that protocol hasn't (yet) been added to the
   0.10.x series of xorg drivers.

I understand there was a patch submitted to add serial protocol support
to current xorg, but the person who provided it never followed up on
its review and so it hasn't been fixed or applied to date...  as there
aren't too many people who actually have such a tablet anymore, not a
lot can really happen until someone who does can provide (and maintain)
such a patch for it.

So your options at this stage, are basically:

 - Stick with older xorg/wacom on the machines you want to use this
   tablet with.
 - Forward port support for it to the newer driver.
 - Treat yourself to a new USB tablet and have support for all the
   hotplug niceness, with no need to manually configure it.

Sorry,
Ron