Installing a drawing tablet on Linux, in sixteen easy steps!

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1
  1. Download the drivers and compile the source code
  2. Figure out it doesn’t work because your kernel is not supported
  3. Update the kernel
  4. Download and recompile the NVIDIA drivers
  5. Figure out that for whatever reason the new development packages were not installed, and are not available from the repository you got the kernel from
  6. Track down and install the devel package
  7. Try reinstalling the video drivers
  8. init 5
  9. Compile the tablet drivers
  10. Pretend compilation warnings didn’t happen
  11. It works!
  12. Get nervous about compilation errors
  13. recall that the make file was compiled under previous kernel
  14. make, make install
  15. no more errors!
  16. IT WORKS!
2

Fortunately, my Wacom Intuos 4 works without me doing anything but plugging it in. I’ve been in that situation with a network card and a USB headset in the past, though.

3

yeah. I have a Huion H610 pro. It;s a nice tablet, and wasn’t very expensive. But unfortunately no out-of-the-box support like the Wacom drivers.

4

Same here. I just plug it in.

Then again, I did research before buying, to find out what was natively supported :slight_smile:

5

My graphics tablet is a cheap Genius and is also supported by evdev driver just by plugging the tablet. This support is thanks to the community, not by Genius that does not do Linux drivers. So I do not recommend Genius for Linux.

Your graphics tablet should be supported from the Kernel >= 3.17:

What Linux distribution you’re using and what version of the kernel?

By the way, DIGImend maintainer is leaving the project and we really need someone to replace him for this important project.

Edit:
Please, edit your first message and clarify these steps to run a graphics tablet are only required in your particular case, not all tablet/Linux distributions.

6

CentOS ships with kernel 3.10. I’ve updated to 4.8 which is the most recent kernel-ml release. Tablet works fine so far with Digimend. Things are going much smoother now, even my Mackie 400F is running, something I never got to work out on Win 10 (I’ve heard rumours it can work?)

But I thought it was pretty clear that this was meant as a joke, poking fun at how, at time, Linux can be a pain to accomplish the most simple things (with it’s strengths do come some drawbacks).

Of course this is all system-specific.

7

It wasn’t clear at all.

It isn’t linux being a pain to work with, it’s hardware manufacturers being a pain by refusing to provide support for linux…

:slight_smile:

1 Like
8

My Experience:

  1. Buy a WACOM drawing tabled
  2. Use Archlinux (Or a distro that has actual recent kernel/package versions. Debian is OK, Ubuntu is worse, Mint worse again…)
  3. Just Works.

OR:

  1. By not-wacom
  2. Discover tablet that was bought can have two different PCB’s inside
  3. Discover the two PCB’s use the same USB VID/PID
  4. Discover that the community-driver built into the kernel supports the other one
  5. Discover you’d have to compile your own kernel
  6. Decide to use xinput to remap the button on the side to ‘draw’ so you don’t have to
  7. Use tablet without pressure sensitivity for a year
  8. By a WACOM