Comment 17 for bug 790130

I found that compiling Inkscape from source (rather time-consuming,
even on an i3 processor) gets the pen pressure working again for
a Wacom Intuos4 "small" tablet.

The steps to build from source are described on the Inkscape wiki
  http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Compiling_Inkscape#Developer_Compilation
but since they're a little "thin" for Ubuntu, I include the steps I took below,
on Ubuntu Natty 11.04, in case it helps anyone.

I noticed that the problem is still not fixed in the now-released
Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot (as mentioned by Richard), and even
worse, the gimp is having problems (mysterious horizontal lines
appearing for no reason), which is sad. So I opted
to remain on Natty 11.04 and just build Inkscape from source.

To perform a debug build of Inkscape (on Ubuntu Natty 11.04),
to get pen pressure working properly, I proceeded as follows:

mkdir $HOME/inkscape_my_build
cd $HOME/inkscape_my_build
mkdir build-gcc build-g++

# Install as many of the build dependencies as possible...
sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape

# Install some more build dependencies, I might have missed some...
sudo apt-get install rcs libtool libgc-dev intltool libglib2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libpng12-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev liblcms1
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gtk-2.0 gawk g++ ccache

# Get all of the source code, from the bzr code repository.
sudo apt-get install bzr
bzr branch lp:inkscape

cd inkscape
libtoolize --copy --force
./autogen.sh
cd ../build-gcc
CFLAGS='-g -O0 -Wall' CC='ccache gcc' ../inkscape/configure
cd ../build-g++
CXXFLAGS='-g -O0 -Wall' CXX='ccache g++' ../inkscape/configure
cd ../build-gcc && make -j 3
cd ../build-g++ && make -j 3

If everything worked properly, and you didn't get any
error messages (google for them if you did, or look in
the log files mentioned by the build output, to try to
figure out the missing package), four new executables appear:

$HOME/inkscape_my_build/build-g++/src/inkscape
$HOME/inkscape_my_build/build-g++/src/inkview
$HOME/inkscape_my_build/build-gcc/src/inkscape
$HOME/inkscape_my_build/build-gcc/src/inkview

You can try out Inkscape at this point to see if the pen
pressure is working for you, just by running the following
command (the icons will be all replaced by "missing" symbols,
since the program isn't fully "installed" yet).

$HOME/inkscape_my_build/build-gcc/src/inkscape

If you're feeling brave, you can install the program (so that
it appears with all the pretty icons and things we're used to
seeing with the packaged Inkscape), as follows:

cd $HOME/inkscape_my_build/build-gcc
sudo make install

Then to run it, you can use:

/usr/local/bin/inkscape

(at this point, "Help"->"About Inkscape" shows "Inkscape 0.48+devel r"
 in the top-right corner of the window).

Obviously, it'd just be a stopgap measure, since I guess an arbitrary
development build of Inkscape would hardly be the most stable thing
to use, but we could perhaps figure out how to download
the sources of the stable release and build those, to give it a try.