1.2 - How To Use This Document

In terms of document organization, if you have not figured it out already, you can browse the document one page at a time, or you can click on the ALL link and view the entire thing in one long page.

Where the guide differs between distributions or packages, I have added a comment which appears indented with a light blue background.

Also, it bears mentioning since it's a detail often missed: there are two drivers in the Linux Wacom Project- wacom.o and wacom_drv.o. The first driver is the USB kernel driver. The second driver is the XFree86 Wacom driver. Serial users need only be concerned with the wacom_drv.o driver. USB users need both. If you try to use the wacom_drv.o driver in place of the wacom.o kernel driver or visa-versa, things generally won't work.

Next, this document was written with the assumption that you are starting from scratch with a relatively recent distribution of the Linux kernel. Also, if you have already added lines to your XFree86/Xorg configuration file (XF86Config/XF86Config-4 or xorg.conf), you should comment them out and restart X. Since we'll be stepping through the entire process, we need X to ignore the tablet until we're ready. Otherwise, X will just get in the way.

Finally, if you know what you're doing, you can leave your X settings intact, print this out, switch to runlevel 3, and follow along from the console. An HTML version of this document can be found in the docs directory at docs.html.