Since a while e.g. the X11 driver for Wacom tablets should work out of the box, no calibration needed. I didn't test other tablet/touchscreen drivers in the last time, but I assume also some other should work out of the box. But sometimes you still need to calibrate your device.
But how do you calibrate e.g. your wacom tablet on a openSUSE 11.3 or Factory, since there is no wacomcpl anymore in the package, which was used in the past? And how about a evdev based device? Simply use xinput_calibrator. You can get the package for openSUSE from my openSUSE buildservice repo.
After installation follow these steps on shell:
# check if xinput_calibrator found any device
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator --list
Device "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen" id=10
# start calib.: for multiple devices use --device option
user@tablet:~> xinput_calibrator
You get this screen, follow the instructions:
You get some output with some instructions as soon as you finished the procedure. The preferred way to setup the tablet/touchscreen with the calibration data is coping a snippet from the output into '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf' (as root). Here an example for such a snippet:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "calibration"
MatchProduct "Wacom ISDv4 90 Pen"
Option "MinX" "0"
Option "MaxX" "28606"
Option "MinY" "0"
Option "MaxY" "17876"
EndSection
You may need to restart your X-server after setting up the file. If it doesn't work checkout the instructions in the output for other ways to setup the changes.