Decided to give another shot at fixing the wacom tablet in my Gentoo install. I've got a fix, but it's pretty ugly. The problem was that the tablet would, when the pen approached it, start running the cursor along either the left or right side of the screen up and down (very fast). From the fix, it looks as though the usbmouse kernel driver was grabbing the tablet input.

Fix (hack) is to create a script that does:

rmmod usbmouse
rmmod wacom
modprobe wacom
modprobe usbmouse

then run it as superuser on every startup. Would prefer to just specify the order of loading, but AFAICS I'm never actually specifying that usbmouse get loaded, it just seems to be getting loaded by some magic in genkernel (I do want it to support the actual USB mouse I use as backup for the tablet, btw).

Annoying thing is that I now have two of these scripts, one to run xmodmap to fix the messed up keyboard "compose" keys, and now the one to fix the tablet. Would be nice if I had proper fixes for both some day. Sigh.