The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Dual Displays vs Wacom Tablet vs xorg.conf

    So, as I wondered there, it turns out that the tablet cursor can fall into the crack between my landscape left monitor and portrait right monitor, with the distressing result that the X server jams with the pointer jittering between the two displays. Worse, the keyboard isn’t active, so I can’t switch to a console screen and shoot X in the head.

    I’m guessing this is a picket-fence error, where Something Bad Happens when the cursor hits the maximum possible value: X=16704, in this case.

    The solution seems to be telling the Wacom driver that the tablet is just slightly wider than it really is, so that the X value can’t ever reach the maximum. Having done this before, the line is already in my xorg.conf, just waiting to be un-commented:

    Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Wacom - stylus"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Option          "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
        Option          "USB" "on"
        Option          "Type" "stylus"
        Option          "Button2" "3"
        Option          "Button3" "2"
        Option          "MMonitor" "off"
        Option          "ScreenNo" "0"
        Option          "BottomX" "16710"
    #    Option          "BottomY" "11893"
    EndSection
    
    Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Wacom - eraser"
        Option          "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Option          "USB" "on"
        Option          "Type" "eraser"
        Option          "MMonitor" "off"
        Option          "ScreenNo" "0"
        Option          "BottomX" "16710"
    #    Option          "BottomY" "11893"
    EndSection
    

    That seems to work, but the failure was intermittent. We shall see…