Using an old Wacom Graphire tablet in OS X 10.10 Yosemite

I love it when I make things work that shouldn’t and I also love saving money. This does both.

I have an old Wacom Graphire graphics tablet model ET-0405-U. It’s not supported by recent versions of OS X, but graphics tablets are expensive, I’d like to use it and I am short of cash.

It turns out you can get an old Wacom Graphire tablet working is MacOS X 10.10. Here’s how:

  • download driver 6.1.5-2 and install it – control-click and open if OS X complains it’s from an untrusted source.
  • The problem now is that the preference panel won’t open, so find System Preferences in your Applications folder. Highlight it and press cmd-I to get the Information box. Tick ‘Open in 32 bit mode’ (and low resolution if you have a retina display). Now you can open the Wacom Tablet preference panel in System Preferences. Set up your tablet. Then ctrl-I again on System Preferences and turn off 32 bit mode.
  • Happy drawing!

(This is the combined wisdom of two contributors, davidphenry and jprazak on this thread on the Apple forums).

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12 Responses to Using an old Wacom Graphire tablet in OS X 10.10 Yosemite

  1. jon says:

    perfect.. many thanks

  2. jens says:

    you save me a whole day of installing stuff! thanx.

  3. Martin Hewer says:

    At last it is working….. thanks a lot! X

  4. Peter says:

    Thanks for taking the time to help solve this. I still have my Graphire from 2000. I can still remember forking out 99$ for it and at the time it was a lot for me. Working flawlessly for years. Every now and then I find one at a flea market for a few bucks. I have a little collection now with pens. LOL.

  5. jon says:

    hey.
    i followed your advice but ended up with an error message when i tried to open the WACOM TABLET panel.

    ‘Preferences Error
    Could not load Wacom Tablet preference pane.’

    any advice?
    thanks :)

  6. Well that was very clever of you. It makes me think you might be able to answer this question. Will a new Wacom tablet (looking at the small) run on Yosemite on a 2012 iMac? I would be ok doing it with the cable if I don’t have Bluetooth and I don’t know if I do or not but suspect yes. I use a wireless keyboard if that means I do.

  7. Daryl Urig says:

    do not see this option in 10.10.5 help please

  8. Felix Arenas says:

    I’ve been setting up a new PC at home and one of the things I struggled with was getting my Wacom Graphire 4 tablet working. I have the same problem and I’m beginning to think it just won’t work with later versions of Mac OS .
    I was checking out XP-PEN : https://www.xp-pen.com graphics tablets, which are so much cheaper than Wacom’s that it’s probably worth taking a punt and buying one anyway.

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