From: Brian
<linux-thinkpad(a)brisammon.fastmail.fm>
Thanks for the research.
I strongly suspect that this can be made to work with
modern X without
any programming required, but a lot more internet research.
That would be great.
I think the statement that "serial wacom tablets
are no longer
supported" may mean that the support has been removed from the X-Windows
driver, but there is a different driver that will get it to work (maybe
a linux wacom kernel module?)
The sentence says
Note that as of version 1.0, the xf86-input-wacom driver no longer
supports serial devices.
so it appears to refer to the drive version.
When I was wandering around, I found more recent
reference to "ISD-V4"
drivers that may be what you need.
I don't know what that means.
Sadly, the X log doesn't give any detail of what protocol the driver
discovered. Unless WACf004 is a protocol.
An old hackintosh page
has this intriguing paragraph
Tablet
Working as of 2008-03-19. There is a project called TabletMagic,
InsanelyMac Forum Link, that will support Wacom tablets on
TabletPCs or outside the machine. The X61t requires an enabler for
the tablet to work, as Lenovo shuts off the serial port in the
BIOS, and you have to use ACPI to reenable it. Download is
available at the bottom of this post under 'TabletEnabler-1.1',
and the source code is available if you'd like to poke at it. Once
you have that in, you have to edit
Apple16X50Serial.kext/Contents/PlugIns/Apple16X50ACPI.kext/Contents/Info.plist,
and replace the PNP0501 with WACF004. You can then configure
TabletMagic. If this works well for you, donate to Scott! He has
worked very hard on TabletMagic, and deserves a little extra money
in his wallet. I only enabled a device, he made it all work.
Probably finding a forum with more wacom-driver
experts would be useful.
Maybe posting an "issue" in the github would find you somebody helpful.
Since Debian was mentioned, I did a little grepping of my
downloaded-debian-archive and I have xserver-xorg-input-wacom version
0.7.9.3-2 for Lenny (Debian5) and version 0.34.0 for stretch (Debian
v9).
Those two version numbers don't seem to be in the same system. Both
look to be less that 1.0
It's definitely possible to run old Debian X
packages on an
otherwise-modern Debian install (or one that started old and has been
selectively upgraded). You could poke around
http://archive.debian.org/
and grab old versions of the packages.
Interesting.
Or maybe this Thinkpad is too old to be worth all that
effort...
Maybe. Too much effort right now.