I’m running final tests on, and will soon release, NSSM 2.3. NSSM – the Non-Sucking Service Manager – was originally written as a replacement for the venerable srvany, a tool which allows you to install any application as a Windows NT service.

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Some weeks ago Fedora 12 obsoleted linuxwacom and replaced it with xorg-x11-drv-wacom which apparently is a brand new XInput-based driver for Wacom tablets.

Immediately this caused me great pain and suffering as TPCButton mode, ie the thing where you hold a side button and tap the pen to do a click, stopped working and my side buttons were swapped round.

Rather than take the time to figure out what had happened I simply removed the xorg-x11-drv-wacom RPM and force installed the old linuxwacom to restore the status quo.

Last week, however, I forgot to exclude xorg-x11-drv-wacom from the list of packages NOT to be updated by YUM and lo and behold the RPM was installed again. This time I decided to get it working properly by reading the documentation about the transition.

Ha! Only kidding. There isn’t any documentation. So by trial and error – which is usually how these thing work – I managed to figure out what was going on.

With the old driver you added InputDevice sections to xorg.conf to declare the tablet devices and map them to /dev/input entries in the filesystem. You could then add options to these sections or use xsetwacom to set them on the fly.

Turns out you can still use xsetwacom. It’s just that the device names in your xorg.conf aren’t used any longer. I used xinput --list to enumerate the XInput devices on my display and found that four Wacom devices were present of which the most important was Wacom Intuos3 6×11. Since xsetwacom still works I was able to get my button swapping back by doing

    xsetwacom --set 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' Button2 3
    xsetwacom --set 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' Button3 2

The "correct" way to do so, however, is to run xinput --get-button-map 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' and note that the buttons are interpreted as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and, since I wanted to swap 2 and 3, do

    xinput --set-button-map 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' 1 3 2

TPCButton mode was previously set by doing xsetwacom --set <device> TPCButton on and at first I thought this was broken as I ran xsetwacom --set 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' TPCButton on and nothing happened. A bit more digging (with xinput --list-props 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11') revealed why: the property has been renamed Wacom Hover Click and defaults to on. In other words when hover click is on you don’t need to tap in order to do a click with the side buttons. So to get the mode I wanted I could do either of the following:

    xsetwacom --set 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' TPCButton off
    xinput --set-prop 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' 'Wacom Hover Click' 0

Running xinput --list-props 'Wacom Intuos3 6x11' reveals the other editable properties, some of which have also been renamed.

If you’re following along from home remember that your device won’t be called Wacom Intuos3 6×11 unless it is, in fact, a Wacom Intuos3 6×11 (and maybe not even then).

Happy tabletting.