In the most recent version of Ubuntu, I had to turn off HAL and go back to just using xorg.conf.  You can follow a very confused thread (on my part) about this, which eventually leads to success: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a3297bc90905291044q749cdd85i572f6b4ec771d24f%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=linuxwacom-discuss

... but, essentially you need to remove the hal configure scripts, then make sure the Mouse section in your xorg.conf file does not point to '/dev/input/mice', but to whatever your mouse actually is.  Then your tablet will just spit out events without controlling the pointer.

Rich

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 3:07 AM, Joćo Pais <jmmmpais@googlemail.com> wrote:
Actually, I was wondering something else too, Thomas or others who use a
wacom tablet on macs.  Do you keep it as a pointer device, or is there a way
to turn this off?  In linux, I was able to just disable it as a pointing
device so it was solely a controller in pd.

can you post instructions about that somewhere? I might be trying to do that, but the control of hid changes with each linux version (which is the same time frame as I try to use linux).