Wacom Graphire2 and Irix update

Following this post in the Nekochan forums, I did some more test with my Wacom Graphire2 USB tablet. The goal was to check if pressure levels works with the sgi driver, the driver supplied with the Irix distribution cd's.

A quick search returned two interesting pages:

• The SGI Irix Input man page. Where all the configuration paremeters are described.
• Andreas Backaus's Wacom tablets on IRIX page. Here you will find how to install the Wacom Control Panel with the SGI driver. Unfortunately this tip onlyworks with serial devices.

The results are good. Not fantastic but pressure levels are working. I never used a tablet before but in my case to use the pressure level function I have to use a button to draw. While I push the button I can move the pencil away and closer to change the with of the draw. If I press the tablet the color changes to background color. (Extracted from my post in Nekochan forums).

In the following pic you can find an example of the pressure changes in size and color. The config file is also open:

The next job will be check if the Absolute Mode works. I checked some different setting but with no results.

We will see...

Fuel goes Gigabit !!!

From a long time that everybody want his systems with GigaBit EtherNET. In SGI systems there is a few options and usually are expensive. In fact, SGI cards are really 3Com rebranded ones and a mod can be done. All cards have a Tigon 3 chipset (Broadcom 5701) but with different PCI identification in its EEPROM.

First mod was a new driver kernel, you can find all the information in this post of the nekochan forums, but with this kind of mod the card only runs in a patched IRIX OS.

The best solution now is two modify directly the EEPROM with the ethtool software included in linux distributions. You can find how to do this mod at the end of this post. In my case I tried with my old Fedora 7 installation I have in my workstation with no success, then I recovered and old Gentoo LiveCD 00.2006 and applied the modifications.

Now I have my fuel with GigaBit EtherNET but I have to end my network wiring at home!!!!

13W3 TO VGA Video adaptor cable

This moorning I received a new 13W3 to HD15 adapter from K1Connectivity. This was a Sun to VGA adapter but I ordered because it was the cheapest adapter I find in Ebay, very very cheap!!. Acordingly with this topic in the Nekochan forums, depending of the monitor it can work or not. Using a Sun adapter you need a Sync on Green monitor and the monitor has to cut the oder signals. I have a SoG monitor but it has problems with the other signals wired in the adapter. Two solutions are available:
1.- Cut the pins that I don't need from the adaptor.
2.- Take out the 13W3 plug of the adaptor and make a new cable.

Finally I created a new cable: Cleaning the 13W3 plug was dificult because it was plenty of glue to fix of the cables (the quality of manufacture is very good). I only wired pins A1, A2 and A3 and their shileds to pins 1,2 and 3 of the HD15 (male to plug directly to the monitor). The shields in the HD15 are welded togheter and only one wire and needed to do the cable adapter (bridging all the shields in the 13W3).

And it works!!!

It is not a beauty adaptor but with a new plug case and a little bit of glue it is usable until the end of the days!!!