Building The Driver

The xf86-input-wacom driver provides desktop support for Wacom tablets, touchscreens, and similar hardware. It is responsible for relaying events from the kernel to the X server where applications like GIMP, Krita, and Xournal can make use of them. Additionally, it provides services like palm rejection that improve the experience of using a tablet.

Get the Drivers

The easiest (and recomended) way to get support for Wacom hardware is to install the packages provided by your distribution. Our drivers are provided out of the box with most distributions, but can be updated or installed with the following commands:

Fedora, Red Hat, Mageia
$ sudo -s 'yum makecache && yum install xorg-x11-drv-wacom'
Ubuntu, Mint, Debian
$ sudo -s 'apt-get update && apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-wacom'
SUSE
$ sudo -s 'zypper update && zypper install xf86-input-wacom'
Arch Linux
$ sudo -s 'pacman -Sy && pacman -S xf86-input-wacom'
Gentoo
$ sudo -s 'emerge --sync && emerge xf86-input-wacom'

Building from Source

See also: Dependencies

Tip:Developers cloning from git will want to also install the 'git', 'automake', and 'autoconf' packages. Our repository may be cloned by running git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/linuxwacom/xf86-input-wacom and prepared for building by running ./autogen.sh

There is also the option of building and installing the driver from source. Before doing so, you'll need to install a number of build dependencies. Use the appropriate command below.

Fedora, Red Hat, Mageia
$ sudo yum install gcc xorg-x11-util-macros xorg-x11-server-devel libXext-devel libXi-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel libudev-devel
Ubuntu, Mint, Debian
$ sudo apt-get install autoconf pkg-config make xutils-dev libtool xserver-xorg-dev libx11-dev libxi-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libudev-dev

With all the build dependencies installed, you should now [https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxwacom/files/latest/download download the latest xf86-input-wacom release] and extract it to a convenient location. Open a terminal, and navigate to the directory you extracted. If you were instructed to apply a patch file for testing purposes, download it, move it into the current directory, and run patch -p1 < (replacing "" with the name of the downloaded patch file).

At this point, you should run the following commands to configure, build, and install the driver:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

prefix

Your prefix may differ. You might need to use 'find' to find your distro's location for wacom_drv.so. Then copy the file you generated with make into that location.

Post-Install

After installing the driver, you'll need to restart the driver by logging out. In addition, it may be necessary to configure X before you can use your tablet. See the configuring X page for more information.