Border movement ignored on Bamboo Pen and Touch

[Phill]

Using Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch in absolute mode.

The Wacom Pen and Touch appears to have a 1cm (approx) border outside the marked screen area (including where the buttons are) where it still detects pen movement (indicated by the white light turning red), however, when the pen moved outside the screen area (but still inside the active border area) three things happen that are unhelpful:

1) The pointer often stops short of the edge, making it difficult to access stuff like the Unity launcher.
2) The pen is treated as having been lifted, making it tricky to move scroll bars on the far right.
3) Vertical (when off the left/right edge) and horizontal (when off the top/bottom edge) are ignored.

I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 that's fully up to date using Important Security Updates and Recommended Updates.

Originally asked as question, was suggested I raised it as a bug.

[Phill (phill.l)]

I started looking into a fix for this but it looks like this may have been picked up in a kernel commit last year:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=commitdiff;h=c5981411f60c31f0dff6f0f98d2d3711384badaf

I'm unable to confirm it right now but I'm going on this evidence from usbmon: byte[1] appears to contain 0x00 when you're nowhere near, 0x80 when you're getting close, 0xE0 when you're just outside the border and 0xF0 when you're inside the border. Requiring 0x30, "prox" would only be true by being inside the border (0xF0), whereas the newer code using 0x20 would work for both 0xE0 and 0xF0. Looking at the driver code I think that prox needs to be true for the pen position to get any further.

Will give this patch a try with the latest 11.10 kernel source when I get a chance and report back.

[Phill (phill.l)]

I have rebuilt the kernel, identical code except for the patch states above. It appears to correct the problem. This patch is already in the 12.04 git repository. This improvement is actually in the kernel, not the X wacom driver.