choffee

For reasons I still don't really understand I brought a second hand drawing tablet from CEX. I have always coverted one of the larger drawing tablets and finally this was just staring at me so I thought I would try it.

Many years ago as I was starting my first job a friend and I designed a full screen desk interface. It had a high res full color screen in the middle of the desk and the rest of the desk was low res b&w monitor. The whole desk space was touch screen. You could take the document you where working on and slide it out of the main screen while you worked on something else, you could use a pen or our hand for drawing and typing. If you wanted to send a document to the person opposite you could just slide it off the top of your screen and it would arrive on the top of theirs. It was a great invention but we never got past the idea stage and the idea of that much CRT in one box never quite felt right.

I like to doodle, write, think on paper. I have always had a pad on my desk and now I am lucky to have a Remarkable e-ink tablet that I have beside me on the desk. It's a space to think, to quickly jot a note or just to play with the lines on.

My excuse for this extra tablet was two fold. First off I quite often have a video playing on my laptop and want to get sort of put it in the backgroud and do some other things but the screen is not really big enough. (This is my “home” laptop which I mostly use on the sofa) so I thought a second screen would let me push that video over there. And secondly I would really like have a larger drawing surface. So I could doodle and take notes.

For a lot of devices now on Linux you just plug them in and they work. Not quite so simple here. The screen worked fine plugged in the cables and off it went. The pen did work but it was more in mouse mode. So I needed something to make this work. I tried to find something in the package repos of my OS but no real joy. It's not a wacom tablet so it seems the support it a bit out of the ordinary. Next up was the XP-Pen drivers. They offer some Linux support which is great but it felt a bit clunky and I sort of got it working but no pressure support that I could see. It was also a binary install which always feels flaky. So I searched around and found the Open Tablet Driver Project which offered packages but also has a flatpak so I thought I would give that a go. It worked! There was a little bit of an issue with the old drivers still running but once I had clear that up and set the tablet to not use the entire virtual screen but only the tablet screen it seems to be working. And quite nicely. I've only had it a couple of days but it's already serving the “video offload monitor” use case fine. I've played around with the drawing but not had a real play. Yet.

So in conclusion it's pretty neat. It's yet another gadget in my overcrowded house but I think it's something I will use regularly but we will see. It works with Linux after a bit of tweaking.

Side note about flatpak: The Open Tablet Drive has a background process that runs on boot. I was surprised to see that the flatpak just ran that without issue. Looks like there is support for adding services from the the flatpak. I'm always suprised how flatpak is moving on and solving these little side issues. I know it still has a lot of issues but as a way to distribute software to all linux and not have to package to every distro it works in most cases.