Tablet M-ThinLine, wizardpen driver on Debian

I have a M-ThinLine pen tablet and I wanted to use it under my favorite OS, Debian. I summarize here what I did to make it work.

Apparently there is no driver package (yet?) for this tablet in the official Debian repositories. After a long search over the internet, where there are a myriads of installation tutorials but for Ubuntu, I found this project page which look like the most recent driver according to the version. There is a deb package available but unfortunately it has dependencies with some Ubuntu packages. But the driver sources are there.

After downloading the file 'wizardpen-0.7.0-alpha2.tar.gz', within the archive you will find enough information in the 'INSTALL' file to compile and install the driver. There is an another file 'README-XOrgConfig' for configuring the X-server so it recognizes the tablet. I followed the "HAL-based hotplugging" configuration, but this one did not work for me. So I edited the 'xorg.conf' file, which is a more straightforward way I think.

In the ServerLayout section , you have to add the line [InputDevice "WizardPen Tablet" "AlwaysCore"], so this section should look like this:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier     "Layout0"
Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice    "WizardPen Tablet" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection

And you have to create a new InputDevice section:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier      "WizardPen Tablet"
Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
Driver          "wizardpen"
Option          "Name"          "UC-LOGIC Tablet WP5540U"
Option          "Device"        "/dev/input/by-id/usb-UC-LOGIC_Tablet_WP5540U-event-mouse"
Option          "TopX"          "2262"
Option          "TopY"          "3794"
Option          "BottomX"       "30363"
Option          "BottomY"       "30265"
Option          "MaxX"          "30363"
Option          "MaxY"          "30265"
Option          "TopZ"          "0"
Option          "BottomZ"       "1024"
EndSection

You can obtain the name by typing 'grep -i name /proc/bus/input/devices'. The TopX/Y and BottomX/Y can be obtained by running the calibration tool 'wizardpen-calibrate', which is located in the 'calibrate' directory. In order to enable the pen pressure, you have to add the TopZ and BottomZ option, the current value correspond to the maximum range but you can tweak it at will.

Happy pen tablet installation!