Is there any way to get device support for x11 on a mac?
nope, not that I know of.
wish it weren’t so.
I don’t know of a way to make this work either, but I really wish someone would fix it!
I suspect it has to do with Apple’s X11 not supporting X tablet events; we could try complaining to Apple. There might also be a way to inject tablet events into Apple’s X with some sort of background app; I don’t know enough about X to do something like that.
Failing that, each program would probably need to support Carbon or Cocoa events to make the tablet work; which would be a problem in a program not designed to use them (i.e. anything written for X).
You can also run VMware or Parallels, I think, and allow it to capture the tablet device and use it natively; I’m planning to try this with Ubuntu or Windows 2000 sometime soon, but haven’t gotten around to it.
Seashore is a partial port of Gimp to native MacOS; it has tablet support and is pretty decent.
I haven’t found a way to use Inkscape with tablet support on my Mac; there are a couple decent and inexpensive Mac-native vector drawing programs I haven’t had time to play with, though.
Sorry I don’t have better news… maybe somebody else knows a way to make this happen?
Sarah
I’m not sure what OSX version you have, but I installed x11 from the optional installs on the setup disk (I’m running tiger), and programs that require it (like GIMP) work fine.
Yes, GIMP works fine for me too. Howver, the version I have (Gimp.App 2.2.11) doesn’t recognize any “extended input devices” so things like pressure sensitivity don’t work on tablets.
Sarah
how did the ED crew get around it, AFAIK they had a setup that bypassed any problems
we didnt really get around it, the textures were just done without pressure sensitivity (in retrospect this seems quite ridiculous, yes… but we were young and desperate)
.andy
Rats, I was hoping you had a fix! 
A friend of mine was telling me the other day about using some obscure X api to inject events into his X server; he was doing it to hook up a substantially nonstandard input device. I wonder if it would be possible to write a Cocoa program to intercept the tablet events, translate them into X events, and inject them into Apple’s X server? I looked into it briefly but it’s way beyond me X-wise.
Sarah
I’ve often thought about this - certainly the X server could receive “translated” information from the OS X wacom driver… I don’t know if
a) Apple’s X11.app X server is open-source
or
b) Fink’s X11.app replacement is still being developed.
In the mean time, one thing that we can do is improve blender’s paint tools.