Wacom drawing tablet and Ubuntu Linux?

[Robert Moskowitz]

I have a REALLY old Wacom tablet.  Back to ~'03.

Last year, I just plugged it into my Fedora41/Xfce notebook and it just 
worked.

I could pull it out and try again, but all my Ubuntu systems are servers 
with no GUI...

On 11/18/25 5:31 PM, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Tue, 2025-11-18 at 16:55 +0000, Ian Bruntlett wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have looked at:
>> https://askubuntu.com/questions/284284/wacom-tablet-support-in-ubuntu
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone here had 1) recent experience of using a
>> Wacom
>> drawing tablet and 2) what software you used.
> I used one for a while. My notes are sparse though:
>
>
>   - Need the Wacom driver from here: https://linuxwacom.github.io/
>   - Install from source
>   - It needs to be built against the current Linux headers etc.
>   - If you update the kernel, rerun configure, make, make install.
>   - Then reboot. It might be possible to just reload the driver.
>
> That information is four years old, so take it with a grain of salt.
> The website mentioned now says that the drivers are preinstalled in
> most distros, so it might be as simple as plugging it in nowadays.
>
>> It looks like the tablet works like a mouse in LibreOffice Draw which
>> would be quite helpful.
> It's really good, as you would expect, for drawing. And yes, unless
> handled in more sophisticated ways by drawing programs (that can do
> things like detect pressure, stylus angle and so on) it emulates a
> mouse. It has two modes, absolute and relative. Absolute means that if
> you lift the stylus and put it down somewhere else, the cursor jumps to
> that point (the tablet surface resolution is mapped to the screen
> resolution). Relative means that it doesn't detect position, only
> movement.
>
> I never found absolute mode much use, but for actual drawing,
> especially technical drawing, I imagine it would be invaluable. I used
> mine for quick disgrams, whiteboarding and so on (artistic ability <
> 0).
>
> Regards, K.
>