This project is currently not actively maintained/managed. If you're interested in taking it over, please tell me at info@bitfire.at.
To be informed about updates:
GfxTablet shall make it possible to use your Android device (especially tablets) like a graphics tablet.
It consists of two components:
The GfxTablet app sends motion and touch events via UDP to a specified host on port 40118.
The input driver must be installed on your PC. It creates a virtual "network tablet" on your PC that is controlled by your Android device.
So, you can use your Android tablet or smartphone to control the PC and, for instance use GIMP with your Android tablet as a graphics tablet (even pressure-sensitive, if your hardware supports it).
Help and discussion: GfxTablet discussions
GfxTablet is licensed under The MIT License.
Initial contributor: Ricki Hirner / powered by bitfire web engineering / gimpusers.com
If you use Xorg (you probably do):
Github repository: https://github.com/rfc2822/GfxTablet
On your PC, either download one of these binaries (don't forget to chmod a+x
it):
or compile it yourself (don't be afraid, it's only one file)
git clone git://github.com/rfc2822/GfxTablet.git
kernel-headers
on Fedora)cd GfxTablet/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.
You can either
After installing, enter your host IP in the Settings / Host name and it should be ready.
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.
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):
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.xinput map-to-output "$( xinput list --id-only "Network Tablet" )" DVI-I-1
.