History

"linuxwacom" stands for two things. It is the project name used for wacom-specific implementations (short for "The Linux Wacom Project"). It is also the name of the driver release shipped by the project. The Linux Wacom Project was created in 2002 by John Joganic. The code was kept in CVS and regularly released in the form of a tarball that included kernel drivers, X drivers and various utilities. The main (and long-term) contributor to linuxwacom is still Ping Cheng, a Wacom employee. Wacom naturally has a strong focus on its customers and thus linuxwacom goes into some pains supporting systems all the way back to XFree86-4. However, the X server has changed quite a bit.

In August 2009, Peter Hutterer split out the X11 driver from the linuxwacom package and imported it into a git repository called xf86-input-wacom. This driver has seen quite a bit of rework, dropping of some features (e.g. XFree86-4 support) and gaining others (e.g. input device properties). All modern distributions now ship xf86-input-wacom as9 their X driver for Wacom tablets. Kernel-level device support is developed upstream on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

However, some (mainly enterprise) users need to run specific kernels or X server versions. For these, the Linux Wacom Project provides ongoing support for the linuxwacom tarballs and a newer tarball called input-wacom. Both of these package include kernel ''backports'' for certain kernel versions. Desktop distribution users usually do not need either tarball and should rely on their distribution packages instead. Some more information is available here: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2010/09/wacom-support-in-linux.html

Currently most devices are supported (on modern kernels) through forward compatibility in our Wacom HID kernel driver. As more and more devices are released that are supported by this driver, the need for users to update their input-wacom driver should decrease.

Sourceforge

This project was formerly hosted on Sourceforge. It was moved to Github in 2017. For historical information you may want to check the Sourceforge wiki archive.

Mailing lists and Support

The Linux Wacom Project provided three mailing lists at sourceforge.net before. Since we now fully moved away from sourceforge.net, all issues are filed and communicated at github.com/linuxwacom. Please report your issues at the specific project's page.

The addresses to archives of the old mailing lists are listed below in case you want to search the history of previous discussions.

• [linuxwacom-announce](archives) was a mailing list announcing new software releases.
• [linuxwacom-devel](archives) was the developer's mailing list.
• [linuxwacom-discuss](archives) was a list for general discussions and user problems.