I’ve finally gotten my Wacom tablet to work!
The linuxwacom Debian guide is kinda helpful but a bit redundant, and the howto is terribly verbose; of course the kernel drivers and XFree86 drivers are woefully out of date despite the best efforts of
the maintainers of those packages, so…
Ensure that you have the kernel-headers package for your kernel installed; or if you built from source, have that tree lying around somewhere.
aptitude install wacom-kernel-source wacom-tools. The wacom-kernel-source package will attempt to build the driver for you right away, so find out what your headers path is (in my case, /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.11-1-k7).
Download the linuxwacom tarball that matches the version of your wacom-kernel-source package, and untar it somewhere useful.
Install prebuilt/wacom_drv.o_4.3k2.6 as /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/wacom_drv.o (assuming you’re on an i386 platform; if not you’re going to have to build the X input driver from source and to do that you’ll need the full XFree86 source…)
dpkg -i /usr/src/wacom-<TAB> to install the new wacom kernel driver.
Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to add the InputDevice Sections and ServerLayout Section.
Reboot the machine to get all your shiny new drivers.
X will probably recognise the wacom tablet now, and it’ll work as a mouse; firing up The Gimp may tell you that it can’t find any extended input devices. Check dmesg and /var/log/XFree86.0.log to see if the drivers loaded and have the right versions, anyway.
If The Gimp can’t find your device, chances are there’s some errors towards the bottom of the X log complaining about ioctls on /dev/input/event0. Run wacdump /dev/input/event0, and again on event1, event2, etc until it reports the device as a Wacom tablet; re-edit XF86Config-4 and correct the device entry.
Restart X.
If it’s all worked by now, then The Gimp will now recognise the tablet as an Extended Input Device.
Hurrah!