Arise, Newer Graphics Tablet; But Not So Fast!

The box too wasn't made of bamboo

The box too wasn’t made of bamboo

Once upon a time, I bought a Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet. With its stylus I made many a drawing, til its USB cable died screaming. Actually it died quite some years ago. In the interim, @plasticstitch had told me he had an unused Bluetooth-connected Graphire tablet and sent it by air mail to me where I made many more drawings. This device acted finicky with a Linux operating system, and I was using an Ubuntu distro. One day I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 by dint of installing the Ubuntu fork named ArtistX 1.0, and the device refused to talk via Bluetooth to the tablet.

Today I bought a new tablet, a Wacom Bamboo Pen. Its matte-black housing looks sleeker than the silver-hued Graphire. I’d prefer to have purchased a Wacom Cintiq 24HD, but the Bamboo Pen is the only one I could spare cash on. Incidentally it’s the cheapest they had.

Inside the box are STUFF

Inside the box are STUFF

Having the USB connection instead of the Bluetooth would make it less finicky, but soon I discovered that even with the USB, the Bamboo Pen could not communicate with the ArtistX operating system despite all I could to read about it and troubleshoot it.

I had to find a new way to digitally paint once more using the tools I had.

Posted in Linux, Recent News and tagged , .

Khairul Hisham J. is a freelance artist, writer, editor, translator, English language teacher and a long time tabletop role-playing game player and gamemaster.

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