Notes: In order to use this tool, the following is required:

• The Linux Wacom tool xsetwacom must be installed.
• The command intuos4-led-config (see Part 1) must be installed and located as an executable in one of the directories /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, $HOME/bin.
• The user must be in the sudo group.

Installation

The command line tool is written in Python. Hence, Python and some related stuff must be installed. Under Debian GNU/Linux, this is done with the following command:

To install the config tool, download the source archive. Extract the archive by executing the following command (by replacing xyz with the version number of the archive) :

After that, change directory to the extracted directory:

Build the package by executing:

If an error occurs, then check whether a python library is missing. If the build is successful, then install the package with the command:

After that, the config script intuos4-config.py can be found in the folder /usr/local/bin. Furthermore, a sample configuration is provided in the folder /usr/local/share/intuos4.

Setup

For a quick start, the sample configuration must be copied into the user’s home folder. This is done as follows:

After this, the config tool is ready to use. The command

lists the names of the available profiles. In the example there included are three profiles: Demo,Image Demo, and GIMP.

To apply the profile Demo to the tablet, execute:

Note, that you need to enter your password, since some of the internal commands of the script need superuser rights.

The default name of the tablet device is Wacom Intuos4 6x9 pad which corresponds to the Wacom Intuos4 M tablet. If an Intuos4 tablet of a different size is used, the device name can be passed to intuos4-config.py with the argument --device. Note, that you can determine the name of your device by executing

and removing the tailing PAD.

To apply the profile Image Demo to the tablet, execute:

Note the quotation marks which are used if the name contains a whitespace character.

Creating new profiles

The available profiles are stored in the file settings.xml. It contains an XML document which allows you to add new profiles.

The basic layout of the XML document is:

<intuos4settings device="Wacom Intuos4 6x9 pad">
	<profiles default="Name1">
		<profile name="Name1" lefthanded="false">
		...
		</profile>
	...
		<profile name="Name110" lefthanded="false">
		...
		</profile>
	</profiles>
</intuos4settings>

The element intuos4settings is the outermost element of the XML document. The default device may be provided by the attribute device. The profiles are stored within the element profiles. The name of the default profile may be set with the attribute default. There is no restriction on the number of profiles.

A profile stores the configuration of all eight display buttons plus the button in the center of the wheel. An example for a profile is presented in the next listing:

<profile name="Image Demo" lefthanded="False">
	<button number="1">
		<oled type="image" name="~/.intuos4/icons/icon-cut.png"></oled>
		<keystroke key="ctrl x"></keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="2">
		<oled type="image" name="~/.intuos4/icons/icon-copy.png"></oled>
		<keystroke key="ctrl c"></keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="3">
		<oled type="image" name="~/.intuos4/icons/icon-paste.png"></oled>
		<keystroke key="ctrl v"></keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="4">
		<oled type="icon" name="Save"></oled>
		<keystroke key="">ctrl s</keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="5">
		<oled type="icon" name="Blank"></oled>
		<keystroke key=""></keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="6">
		<oled type="image" name="~/.intuos4/icons/icon-tux-inverse.png">
		</oled>
		<keystroke key=""></keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="7">
		<oled type="icon" name="DebianLogo"></oled>
		<keystroke key=""></keystroke>
	</button>
	<button number="8">
		<oled type="icon" name="WacomLogo"></oled>
		<keystroke key=""></keystroke>
	</button>
	<wheel button="ctrl z"></wheel>
</profile>

The settings of a profile are stored in the element profile. The attribute name stores the name of the profile. This name must be unique. The optional attribute lefthanded handles the orientation of the tablet.

The element button stores the configuration of a particular display button. The number of the button is set by the attribute number which must be an integer between 1 and 8. The subelement oled  contains the configuration of the button’s LED. It owns the two attributes type and name with the following meaning:

• If type equals "icon", then name refers to a builtin icon of the command intuos4-led-config (see Part 1 for details).
• If type equals "image", then name is the path to an image file located on the hard disk.

The element keystroke provides the key stroke of the button. It is stored in the attribute key in the same syntax which is used by xsetwacom.

The element wheel contains the settings of the circle. The key of the button in the center of the circle is set with the attribute button. Again, xsetwacom syntax is used. Independently form the profile, the wheel is setup for scrolling up and down with respect of the rotation direction.

Each user can modify his settings.xml file, this is, adopt the provided profiles or add new ones.

Enjoy!

Contents

• Part 1: A command line tool to set the tablet’s LED displays
• Part 2: A command line tool to configure both the tablet’s displays and keys

Software

• Intuos4 LED manipulation:  wacom-intuos4-led.tar.gz
• Intuos4 python configuration script: intuos4-config-0.001.tar.gz

After reading some reviews, I decided to buy an Intuos4 M tablet for image manipulation with the GIMP. One of the reasons to choose this tablet was that it has eight buttons to which arbitrary key strokes are assignable. Each button has a little LED display besides it, which can be used to display the button assignment as a text or an icon.

After connecting the tablet to my computer (running Debian), I was able to configure the buttons with xsetwacom. However, there was no possibility to set the LED displays. The consultation of the xsetwacom documentation was fruitless. So I searched the developer’s mailing list and found a post which contained a piece of code to access the LED displays. Unfortunately, the code did not work for me, but it provided some useful information on accessing the tablet. The self-imposed challenge was to develop a little C++ application to set to LED displays.

The main features of the application are:

• The application uses libusb to communicate with the tablet.
• Images are converted to an appropriate format using the Magick library. This is, you can download a png/jpg image directly to the tablet, if the image has the appropriate size.
• The application contains an icon library. These icons can be used directly for configuration the tablet display. A bunch of common icons are included in order to use without generating appropriate images.

The remaining part of this post is a little howto covering the setup and usage of the application.

Building the application from source

1. In order to compile the source code, the development packages of libusb and Magick++ libraries must be present on the system. Furthermore,  g++ and make.are mandatory. Under Debian Squeeze, the respective packages can be installed with the following command:
   sudo apt-get install g++ make libusb-1.0-0-dev libmagick++-dev
2. Download the source code, open a terminal window and extract the archive with the following command:.
   tar xzf wacom-intuos4-led.tar.gz
3. Change into the Intuos4-LED/src folder:
   cd Intuos4-LED/src
4. Invoke make to start the compilation:
   make

   If the compilation is successful, then the folder contains two executables named intuos4-led-check and intuos4-led-config. The first one can be used to check whether the tablet works, The second one is the application to configure the tablet’s LED displays.

Test whether the tablet works

Execute the following command and watch the LED displays of the tablet:

The LED displays should pass a little sequence of images and end up with a  button labelling from “Button 1″ to “Button 8″.

Setting the LEDs of the tablet

Note: The application cannot communicate with the tablet via the generic USB interface if the wacom driver module is loaded into the kernel. Hence, the module must be unloaded before setting the LEDs and reloaded afterwards. Concretely, the setup passes the following steps:

1. Unload the wacom module:
   sudo rmmod wacom
2. Configure the LEDs with intuos4-led-config
3. Reload the wacom module:
   sudo modprobe wacom
4. Configure the tablet with xsetwacom

There are two ways to assign an image to an particular LED:

• Use a predefined image icon
• Use a png/jpg image with a size of 64 × 32 pixels

To determine the names of the predefined icons, execute

To assign the icon “Tux” to the display besides button 2, execute

Per default, the setup is done for a right-handed tablet orientation, i.e. with the buttons located on the left side. The perform a left-handed setup (buttons on the right side), the –lefthanded switch can be used.

The image icon-debian.png is assigned to the display of button 3 with the following command:

The folder icons contains example images including the image icon-debian.png.

Generation of text icons

Using ImageMagick it is quite simple to create new text icons using the script text-icon.sh:

The script is located in the icons folder of the source distribution. In order to work, the MSTTCorefonts package must be installed. By calling

the icon icon-copy.png with the text “Copy” is generated. The result is a png image of size 64×32 pixels:

Instead of Arial, you can use any (installed) truetype font by altering the TEXTFONT variable in the above script.

A shell script for automated tablet configuration

The following script is an example for the automated setup of the tablet. Feel free to adapt for your needs.

May the force be with you blog reader (and enjoy the gallery )

Motocross Racing

The MSC Schnaitheim organizes an annual motocross racing weekend. The races are part of the DM Open (German Open Championship). This year I took the chance to take some photographs. Some of them are presented in the gallery below. 

But where´s the problem? Firefox is Open Source. Hence, everybody can build firefox from its source code.  This post describes the steps which are necessary for this purpose.

Preparing Your System

A good starting point are the build instructions from the Mozilla Development Center. In a nutshell, you need to install the development tools (including the GNU compiler collection gcc  and the mozilla distributed version control software  mercurial) and the development packages for several libraries. To do so, execute the following commands as super user:

The first command installs the packages, which are needed to build firefox. (Note: Debian renamed firefox to iceweasel, since they modified the sources). On Ubuntu, replace iceweasel by firefox. The second command installs the development packages which are needed for compilation.

Download The Source Files

The sources are checked out from the appropriate Mozilla repository. There are two alternatives:

• mozilla-1.9.1: Branch development on Firefox 3.5 and Gecko 1.9.1.
• mozilla-1.9.2: Branch development on Firefox 3.6 and Gecko 1.9.2.

You can either download an archive or download the source files directly with mercurial.  For the latter, the command is:

The command creates the folder mozilla-1.9.2 in the current directory and downloads the source files of the firefox 3.6 release therein. Releases of firefox 3.5 are checked out similarly.

To build a localized version of firefox,  a localization pack is required. Again, mercurial is used to check it out. For instance, the command to check out the German localization is:

The data is stored in the folder de in the current directory.

Configuration Of The Build Process

To create the build configuration, a config file is needed. Mine contains the following lines:

The tell the configuration script to use this file, the absolute path has to be exported in the environment variable MOZCONFIG. If the configuration is stored in /usr/src/firefox/config/mozconfig-firefox-de, then the command is:

Alternatively, the configuration can be stored in the file .mozconfig in the user’s home directory. The dot is optional.

Build Firefox

To compile firefox, a compile configuration must be created. This is done with the following command:

If configure succeeds, then the actual build is done with:

The compilation process takes a little time (or a bit more ). Finally, the folder firefox-de contains the firefox build. To create a tar archive, change to that directory and execute

After that the folder firefox-de/dist contains an archive with the firefox build. For instance, on my machine the archive is firefox-3.6.de.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2.

That´s it!

Summers End Open Air 2009 Andernach

Last year I had the chance to take some pictures at the Andernach Summers End Open Air 2009. Axxis, U.D.O., Doro and Gotthard performed live on stage. Here are some of the shots I made. I used a Canon Powershot G10.

Special thanks to JTCozy for organizing a photo pass.