I've wanted a graphics tablet ever since I watched a pretentious little series on BBC2 (Painting With Light, 1987) where artists such as David Hockney were given the Quantel Paintbox to play with for an afternoon. They all produced a load of bobbins, but it looked such fun.
My interest was rekindled when a former colleague of mine, the multi-talented artist David "Peanut" Paramore used to bring a graphics tablet in to work with him a few years ago. The sort of work he produced with it was (and is) incredible and I really wanted to have a go at using a tablet for myself.
So, for Christmas this year, I was delighted to finally receive a Trust TB 5300 graphics tablet. Even after I asked my parents for this, I wasn't actually sure I'd be able to use the thing with GNU/Linux. I had visions of having to take a crash course in C and X programming in order to get the thing to work.
I needn't have worried - the nice thing about the GNU/Linux world is that its users tend to blog about getting unusual bits and bobs working on the operating system, and this was no exception.
A blog called "Dick's Open Source Life", which is written by Dick Thomas, came to my rescue and thanks to this blog post I have the Trust TB 5300 working on Ubuntu Karmic Koala very happily indeed.
Both Inkscape and The GIMP work fine; even pressure sensitivity functioning as expected. I didn't even need to callibrate the tablet as it worked fine out of the box.
In fact, the tablet even works properly when I'm running Macromedia Flash 8 via WINE.
Thanks once again for your help Dick!
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