Odd behaviour with tablet...

[techno-mole]

Okay, not sure this is a bug, but I figured I'd mention it.

Last night I decided to do some drawing, so I fired up gimp and also decided to listen to some music as well, now for some reason the tablet stopped working correctly, and it took me a while to figure it out.

Basically I can run gimp and use the tablet as it should be used with no issues, but if I try to run gimp and rhythm box together the tablet doesn't work ? the light that indicates the tablets being used constantly flickers and I can't get the tablet to work.

This doesn't happen if I use any other music player, now using banshee instead of rhythm box, no idea why this happens and to be honest I can't see how rhythm box would affect my tablets operation in any way shape or form, but it does.

I'm running Ubuntu (10.4) Lucid Lynx 64bit.
My tablet is a Trust tb-6300 tablet.
Output of lsusb is - Bus 004 Device 002: ID 5543:0005 UC-Logic Technology Corp. Genius MousePen 8x6 Tablet
I'm using the wizardpen driving from Drmo ppa.

 I have also attached my xorg.log

Obviously this is not a major problem, banshee works just as well in my opinion, I just thought I'd mention it.

[techno-mole (techno-mole)]

Just an update, I have just discovered that if I start rhythm box the led on the tablet flickers like mad and I can't move the cursor with the stylus, this is without gimp running, or any other app for that matter, it's very strange.

[techno-mole (techno-mole)]

Sorry about this, I should have tested it before posting the last message.

It seems that if I start rhythm box to create the issue I first reported, even if I shut rhythm box down the led on the tablet still flickers, and even if I restart the system (not log out and back in) the led is still flashing and the only way to stop it, is to unplug it and then plug it back in again.

I have wondered whether it's something to do with the way rhythm box detects devices (eg-mp3 players and the like) is it somehow mistaking my tablet as an mp3 player ? sounds stupid to me, but it seems to be what's happening.

[techno-mole (techno-mole)]

I have solved the problem, well almost.

It seems that the "portable players MTP" plugin for rhythm box is some how affecting the tablet, although I don't know why, if I disable it I can use the tablet and rhythm box at the same time with no issues.
Although this doesn't really explain what's going on, I'm guessing it's something to do with the way the plugin detects devices, but I'm not sure, my knowledge of this sort of thing can be written on the back of a postage stamp :-)

[Ali Lown (a-lown0)]

That would seem weird.
Assuming that it is MTP's routines that are causing the problem, can you say as to whether you have the tablet issues whilst running mtp-detect/mtp-connect.

[techno-mole (techno-mole)]

I agree it is weird, never had a problem before, no idea why it's an issue now, I use rhythm box on a regular basis and this is the first time it's happened.

Running - mtp-detect in terminal gives the following -

libmtp version: 1.0.2

Listing raw device(s)
   No raw devices found.

And running mtp-connect in terminal gives the following -

Your system does not appear to have UTF-8 enabled ($LANG="en_GB.utf8")
If you want to have support for diacritics and Unicode characters,
please switch your locale to an UTF-8 locale, e.g. "en_US.UTF-8".
libmtp version: 1.0.2

No devices.

And running both commands gives the same results as far as the tablet is concerned, it stops working and the led flickers, the only way to stop it is to un-plug the thing.

Cheers.

[Ali Lown (a-lown0)]

Hmm.
Well at least that confirms that it is down to how the MTP library detects devices.

[Ali Lown (a-lown0)]

Workaround noted above: disable the mtp plugin of rythmbox.
Not enough information to tell what mtp is doing.

[techno-mole (techno-mole)]

If it makes any difference this issue doesn't occur in Maverick alpha 3, I've run the mtp commands and run rhythm box with the mtp plugins enabled and I've had no erratic behaviour from the tablet, apart from the cursor moving to the left, which is not related to this, least I don't think it is.

cheers for looking into it anyway.