My aiptek 12000u arrived today. It's a refurbished tablet but it appears to be in the original packaging. This is what I'm doing to get it configured under linux.

First, I had to go to the Aiptek driver web site. The SourceForge site has a downloadable package. That package allows you to build three pieces: the kernel driver, the X driver and a user level management tool. The X driver doesn't have to be built and, at least initially, I'm not building it.

1. There is an installer script called aiptek-installer.pl. This requird the perl-Gtk2 package for fedora Core 3. My rpm db must have been messed up because the dag repository kept giving me errors like this:
   

   //var/cache/yum/dag/repomd.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty

   I fixed it by rebuilding the db (rpm –rebuilddb) and then switching from DAG (which was causing the problem) to Dries (which also had the perl-Gtk2 package) repository. Once that was fixed, I was able to install the perl-Gtk2 package and its dependencies.

2. There are no install instructions for the install script. You also have to run it as root, which is scary when you don't know exactly what's going to be installed. But like the RPMs, you just go with the flow and hope for the best.
3. The script fails spectacularly (lots of errors) because it tries to build the aiptek kernel modules but fails. I'm using a custom 2.6 kernel but don't think I have the /lib/modules stuff installed correctly. And I really don't want to rebuild the kernel – this one works and I can barely remember all the things I did to get this one to work. *sigh*
4. The installer scirpt accepts the -g option but the help message (–help or -?) doesn't list it. The -g option gets you the graphical installer. However, in the end I didn't use the -g option to do the build. It didn't really make it any easier.
5. I had to download the source for my kernel (2.6.11) and copied in the config file for my running kernel (actually, one very similar to it, but not exactly the same one that built this kernel – I lost that kernel config file) from /boot to the source directory. I then had to symlink the real location of the source code to /usr/src/linux. I had to run “make oldconfig” and “make” in the kernel source directories to generate the header files required for the aiptek kernel module build. Then I reran the aiptek-install.pl script.

Linux 2.6 has a different method of building kernel modules that doesn't require having the complete source (unlike kernel 2.4 which did require the kernel source), although my configuration doesn't allow this cuz of the messed up way I built the kernel originally for this laptop. But apparently the aiptek package doesn't use this method even when it builds for the 2.6 kernel – it still requires the kernel source. Anyway, once I did all this I was able to run the installer script which built the kernel module and installed it into the /lib/modules/…/drivers/usb/input directory. I ran modprobe aitptek to install the module. No problem. Now its time to configure X based on the aiptek web site suggested configuration. Then I can run my first test with the tablet.

With the kernel driver installed, I configured /etc/x11/xorg.conf the way it says to configure it on the Aiptek driver web site. This is what happened next:

You have to have the tablet plugged in when you load the kernel driver lest the /sys (2.6) or /proc (2.4) entries will not show up.
The configuration listed for the xorg.conf file specify /dev/input/aiptektablet as the device, but of course that doesn't exist. You have to plug in the device and then look at which device file gets updated. It looked like /dev/input/event3 and /dev/input/mouse2 get updated for my situation, so I symlinked /dev/input/event3 to /dev/input/aiptektablet.
With this configuration my X server was able to start again, but the tablet didn't do anything.
I tried to build the gaiptek application under src/gaiptek. This required installing the gtkmm2-devel package and then running autogen.sh. This will automatically generate and run the “configure” script. However, the default configuration tries to do NLS stuff, but the directory configuration for this application is incomplete. You can get the configure script generated, and you can run it with –disable-nls to generate the build environment, but running make dies with

Makefile.am:4: AM_GNU_GETTEXT used but `intl' not in SUBDIRS

configure.in:27: required file `./ABOUT-NLS' not found

And that's s far as I got tonight. I'll try again tomorrow. One thing is for certain – support for this tablet might be available and full featured, but installation is not for the faint of heart. I'll probably need to contact the developers or, at a minimum, scan the mailing lists to see if there is anything useful there.