GIMP and Inkscape Stylus Tracking Problem

If you use a Wacom Graphire tablet and drawing tools GIMP 2.4 or Inkscape 0.45.1 on Windows Vista, you may find the cursor unresponsive; for instance, it would halt and jump to a new location after a some seconds of use. The problem seems to be caused by the underlying GTK library not processing all the events from the tablet device. Drawing tools that use different libraries, such as Paint.Net don't have this problem.

A work-around is to avoid using devices via the WinTab interface. Just add the following option to the Windows shortcut for the GIMP and Inkscape: --no-wintab.

There's some drawbacks of this work-around:

• You can't use the pressure sensor on the Wacom stylus to change the drawing cursor in the GIMP.
• You can't use the eraser on the rear of the Wacom stylus as another drawing tool.

2008-05-06: Another bug to track is Wacom Bamboo Doesn't Function with GTK apps in Win32.

GIMP 2.4 Released

GIMP 2.4 has been released. For occasional users with Windows Vista, the most noticeable change is that it only takes seconds to load after the first time; in version 2.2.x, it used to take about half a minute. However, support for Wacom tablet is not good; the pointer still freezes after some seconds. Maybe the next version of GTK would improve the situation?

Windows Command Selected Text

If I inadvertently click in a Windows cmd window when a batch job is running, the job halts because the window blocks all output while it waits for me to make a selection. The fix, of course, is to just hit the return key and clear the selection. Now I notice that if I start highlighting a selection, the text in the title bar is prepended with Select.

Windows Games Mysteriously Halting

My son found a problem with his computer. Sometimes, the game he was playing would halt after it started. Then he said that if he defragmented the hard disk, the game would start running again. I didn't think too much about it until the problem occurred yesterday evening. When I examined his computer, I realised that it had run out of disk space. The game didn't crash; it was waiting for some spare disk space to write its files. When he defragmented the hard disk, some space was freed up, so the game could continue running. I freed up about a third of the hard disk and there's no problems running games again.