Good Morning from my Robotics Lab, this is Shadow_8472, and today, I am trying to get my sister’s drawing pad to work in Gimp on Linux. Let’s get started.
I went into this project by looking for official support. None given, they only officially support Windows and Mac. But, I learned that Wacom, the company that made the Intuos is cooperative in facilitating community support.
Now, I have used the drawing tablet in Windows before using a somewhat older version of Photoshop. The basic operation, as I learned it is as follows: Draw with the tip and erase with the other end. The harder you draw, the darker the line. A variety of buttons on the side stand in for normal Shift, Alt, and Ctrl keys, as well as other functions. A touch scroll can control the brush size, zoom settings, or anything you would normally use the mouse wheel for. And it’s complete with a control panel with enough settings to discourage anyone who doesn’t want to set aside a day or two setting the thing up exactly how they want it. The term is called, “decision fatigue:” you get to a place where you have so many options that anything feels better than continuing to look.
Armed with the hypothesis I was likely to find a solution fairly quickly, I simply plugged the device in and opened Gimp. That first, glorious success when it actually drew when I put pen to pad was beautiful… until I put the eraser to the pad and that drew too. The buttons on the side of the pen seemed to register as inputs as well, but the pressure feature was a no-show. I just tested the scroll wheel and other buttons, and they don’t seem do do anything useful. The scroll pad just seems to center the picture vertically and the function change button seems to just blink the mouse pointer.
Looking into the correct drivers is proving a challenge. I still don’t fully understand the situation, and I have found old support forums seem to go stale after more than a few years as software is maintained. One old forum directed me to a particular package to download, but apt-get stopped me as there were dependencies that couldn’t be resolved.
I did a little more research, and it looks like support for my version of Linux isn’t as easy as I would have hoped. A two year old Ubuntu MATE forum post broke the discouraging news. I will need to look into finding what distribution is going to be the easiest to work with this… less than standard input device if I want to avoid a year or two of learning how to write my own driver for it.
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A new hope spot: My entire situation has more than just the OS in between user and brushstrokes. Maybe the tablet is already fully supported but not properly configured. If so, Gimp just needs to be told what to do.
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I found a command to run in the terminal to list the “devices” associated with the tablet, but it could be the “devices” supported by a particular driver for it. Either way, my current thoughts are that the tablet is supported, just incorrectly configured.
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http://lifeofageekadmin.com/configuring-wacom-tablet-for-use-on-gimp-2-8/
I found this tutorial on how to get Gimp and the Intuos to play nice, and it happens to be on a distro of Linux, Fedora in this case. I won’t say the tablet is 100% functional, but I’d say it’s well on its way. I was able to draw in Gimp using the varying pressure, erase with the eraser, and I think the scroll wheel switched tools. I’ve heard of additional software to make it work fully, but I’m happy with it for now.
This week, I got a lesson in looking for problems in the right places. If I had considered that Gimp wasn’t Photoshop and focused on the easier solutions first, I wouldn’t have gone around trying to install redundant/already held drivers. Final Question: When was a time you tried to fix a problem with the wrong approach?