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Configuring Genius G-Note 7100 in Linux

By Kamal Wickramanayake, 13 July, 2010

Recently I bought this device to draw online. Even though the internal storage device was auto detected when the USB cable was plugged in, the pen (or graphics tablet) function didn't work without installing the "wizardpen" driver.

I still use Fedora 11 and hence went about getting the rpm version of the driver from this page. If you use Ubuntu, check out this page to download wizardpen. Even compling and installing shouldn't be that difficult. The version of wizarpen I used is 0.7.0 (probably that's what you see as 0.7.0-alpha2 on the linuxgenius download page).

After installation, there was a small issue. When the pen was moved, it only occupied a small region of the top left corner of the computer screen. It could not be moved to other areas. The problem could easily be resolved by specifying the screen size in the configuration file.

You can configure wizarpen in two places. One is the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The other is the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/99-x11-wizardpen.fdi. Do your configuration only in one place. In my case, I don't have anything in xorg.conf file about the wizardpen.

The configuration that was critical to get the pen movements to be possible across the entire computer screen was specifying the width and height of the screen itself (ScreenX and ScreenY settings). Here's my full .fdi file content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
    <!-- "info.product" MUST match the name of your tablet: -->
    <!-- grep -i name /proc/bus/input/devices               -->
    <match key="info.product" contains="UC-LOGIC DIGITAL-Organizer">
    <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">wizardpen</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>

    <!-- Modify these configurations accordingly -->
    <!-- Use "man wizardpen" for the full-set of -->
    <!-- configurable options                    -->
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TopX" type="string">0</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TopY" type="string">0</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomX" type="string">3999</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomY" type="string">3999</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxX" type="string">3999</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxY" type="string">3999</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.TopZ" type="string">10</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.ScreenX" type="string">1280</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.ScreenY" type="string">800</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.Rotate90" type="string">1</merge>
    </match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

As I understood, TopX/Y and BottomX/Y settings are used to specify the active area of G-Note 7100. You can use the wizardpen-calibrate command to determine correct values after determining the active area of the device you prefer to use. I just wanted to use the entire surface and accordingly the command wizarpen-calibrate returned 0 and 3999  for these X and Y settings.

My screen size is 1280x800. I also wanted the device to be rotated by 90 degrees (landscape) and used. That's why I specified the Rotate90 setting.

Note that all above settings can be specified in the xorg.conf file as well. But if you specify in the .fdi file, you don't have to use the xorg.conf file. Settings in the .fdi file could be changed then and there without restarting X server. To arrive at the perfect settings and each time to get the new values loaded, I just had to unplug and replug the USB cable couple of time.

Again, make sure you have the settings only in one place (either the xorg.conf file or the .fdi file). I mistakenly had settings in both and experienced strange things (like double clicks when I actually did a single click). I realized that If you use both xorg.conf and .fdi files, the pen is mapped as two mice!

That was it and it worked!

Additional things I did:

The internal storage of the device creates .dnt files when you don't use the USB cable but use it as an off-line note taking device. I installed the Digital Organizer (setup exe is found in the bundled CDROM) on Wine. It worked well.

An alternative is to use the perl script availble from http://code.google.com/p/g-note-utils/source/browse/trunk to transform the .dnt files to .svg files I could use the splitpages.py for this purpose.

Things that I am not happy about:

I tried drawing in GIMP. It was working but the lines were not sufficiently smooth. If I drew off-line and then imported the .dnt files, I could see that the lines were of fine quality. So my present configuration doesn't allow me to actually draw graphics using GIMP. But it is good for meetings, etc since fine quality lines is not an issue. However I would love to learn if this device can be used with GIMP to draw good quality graphics. The Digital Organizer software was a bit better (You can draw there as well). But still, not satisfactory.

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