Wacom Bluetooth bug with Ubuntu 12.04.

[reddragdiva]

Update: Solved. Or worked around, anyway: 12.10 beta doesn't show the bug. Cheers to vampwillow for the retrospectively obvious suggestion!

arkady has a deeply annoying Ubuntu bug. The Dell Mini 1012 was happily running Ubuntu 10.10 with its Broadcom wifi (proprietary driver, packaged by Ubuntu) and a Bluetooth-connected Wacom Graphire A5 for a long time. Then 10.10 was EOLed. So it was wiped and replaced with Kubuntu 12.04. The trouble is, this is reliably giving a kernel oops whenever the tablet connects. This does not happen with the mainline 3.2.0 kernel, only Ubuntu's version. But, of course, the mainline kernel doesn't use the proprietary wifi.

The bug is "confirmed", and there's a second report of the same problem, but there's been no sign of fix. Either Ubuntu messed with 3.2.0 in some way that breaks stuff, or it's the Broadcom module interacting badly with the Bluetooth driver. But this worked fine in previous Ubuntus. Update: Disabled the Broadcom driver in jockey, rebooted, got the oops again with an untainted kernel. This does appear to be something Canonical have messed with and broken.

At the moment Arkady is stuck using Windows 7, which is sort of completely shitful and horrible. So the question is: is anyone using any other recent distro, hopefully where the Broadcom wifi driver isn't a massive pain in the arse (though I will even Debian it if that's what it takes), which doesn't crash when you connect a Wacom tablet via Bluetooth? Tips welcomed.

Comments

[holdthesky]

Canonical seem to have an abysmal record when it comes to graphical art. Even if you get the tablet fixed (I couldn't) you'll find unity breaks gimp and this bug also in the Meh! state for months. You can't imagine gcc or the latest social gimmick being broken for that long! Every product needs a focus and it's clear that ubuntu's is elsewhere, which is their legitimate choice. I switched to Mint XFCE edition, which is focused on such things and haven't regreted it for a moment.

[reddragdiva]

They're an Ubuntu fork - do they do their own kernels? Are you saying you've actually used a Bluetooth-connected Wacom successfully with a recent Mint?

Quite a lot of breakage is averted by using stuff that Canonical doesn't mess with, e.g. Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Then there's just Debianish weirdness to deal with.

[holdthesky]

Mint XFCE is a Debian fork, not an Ubuntu fork (unlike raw Mint). I was getting oopses and system lockups with a wired USB Wacom on recent Ubuntus at insert. I don't have a wireless tablet.

[reddragdiva]

Oooooh. This sounds like a hot prospect, in any case - I'll make a Debian boot stick and give it a go.

[holdthesky]

I was thinking about another Canonical distro at the time I switched to Mint, but it seemed worth casting the net wider if I was going to the effort and Mint offered the radically conventional Xfce WM and was explicitly focussed on arty things. (though it seems ok at dev, too).

[reddragdiva]

With the tablet bug, anything with an Ubuntu kernel is suspect.

[psychonaut]

There are no open openSUSE issues regarding crashes or lockups when a Wacom tablet is connected, though there are some regarding Bluetooth devices in general. There appear to be some major open issues with Broadcom WiFi though: Bug 780656, Bug 771546. If none of these issues obviously applies to your hardware you could always create a live CD/live USB and check things out.