What is GfxTablet-USB?

GfxTablet-USB use USB instead of UDP, so it will be more user-friendly and will probably reduce the delays.

It consists of three components:

• the GfxTablet Android app
• the daemon for Android
• the input driver for your PC

License

GfxTablet is licensed under The MIT License.

Initial contributor: Ricki Hirner / powered by bitfire web engineering / gimpusers.com / Misaka 19465

Features

• Pressure sensitivity supported
• Size of canvas will be detected and sent to the client
• Option for ignoring events that are not triggered by a stylus pen: so you can lay your hand on the tablet and draw with the pen.

Requirements

• App: Any device with Android 4.0+ and touch screen
• Driver: Linux with uinput kernel module (included in modern versions of Fedora, Ubuntu etc.)

If you use Xorg (you probably do):

• Xorg-evdev module loaded and configured – probably on by default, but if it doesn't work, you may need to activate the module.

Installation

Part 1: uinput driver

On your PC, either download the binary from release (don't forget to chmod a+x it):

or compile it yourself (don't be afraid, it's only one file)

1. Clone the repository: git clone git://github.com/misaka19465/GfxTablet-USB.git
2. Install gcc, make and linux kernel header includes (kernel-headers on Fedora)
3. cd GfxTablet-USB/driver-uinput; make

Then, run the binary. The driver runs in user-mode, so it doesn't need any special privileges. However, it needs access to /dev/uinput. If your distribution doesn't create a group for uinput access, you'll need to do it yourself or just run the driver as root:

sudo ./networktablet

Then you should see a status message saying the driver is ready. If you do xinput list in a separate terminal, should show a "Network Tablet" device.

You can start and stop (Ctrl+C) the Network Tablet at any time, but please be aware that applications which use the device may be confused by that and could crash.

networktablet will display a status line for every touch/motion event it receives.

Part 2: App

You can either

1. compile the app from the source code in the Github repository
2. download it from releases

After installing, run once first before running uinput driver.

Part 3: Use it

Now you can use your tablet as an input device in every Linux application (including X.org applications). For instance, when networktablet is running, GIMP should have a "Network Tablet" entry in "Edit / Input Devices". Set its mode to "Screen" and it's ready to use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Using with multiple monitors

If you're using multiple screens, you can assign the Network Tablet device to a specific screen once it's running (thanks to @symbally and @Evi1M4chine, see https://forums.bitfire.at/topic/82/multi-monitor-problem):

1. Use xrandr to identify which monitor you would like to have the stylus picked up on. In this example, DVI-I-1 is the display to assign.
2. Do xinput map-to-output "$( xinput list --id-only "Network Tablet" )" DVI-I-1.

Known problems

• With Gnome 3.16 (as shipped with Fedora 22), Gnome Shell crashes when using GfxTablet.