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]

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.