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 recommended) 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:

Distro	Commands
Fedora, Red Hat, Mageia	sudo -s 'dnf install xorg-x11-drv-wacom'
Ubuntu, Mint, Debian	sudo sh -c "apt-get update && apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-wacom$(dpkg -S $(which Xorg) | grep -Eo -- "-hwe-[^:]*")"
SUSE	sudo -s 'zypper update && zypper install xf86-input-wacom'
Arch Linux, Manjaro	sudo pacman -Syu xf86-input-wacom
Gentoo	sudo -s 'emerge --sync && emerge xf86-input-wacom'
Adélie	sudo apk add xf86-input-wacom

Building from Source

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:

Distro	Commands
Fedora, Red Hat, Mageia	sudo dnf 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$(dpkg -S $(which Xorg) | grep -Eo -- "-hwe-[^:]*") libx11-dev libxi-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libudev-dev
Arch Linux, Manjaro	sudo pacman -S --needed --asdeps base-devel xorg-server-devel xorg-util-macros xorgproto libxinerama libxrandr libxi

To build a development version of the driver (e.g. if a developer has instructed you to test a version of the code), you will also need to install your distribution's "git", "automake", and "autoconf" packages.

With all the build dependencies installed, you should now obtain a copy of the source code. Unless you are building a development version, you should download the latest xf86-input-wacom release and extract it to a convenient location. To build a development version, please instead use the specific "git clone" command provided by the developer.

At this point you should open a terminal, navigate to the extracted or cloned directory, and copy/paste the following commands to build and install the driver.

Building with autotools

set -- --prefix="/usr" --libdir="$(readlink -e $(ls -d /usr/lib*/xorg/modules/input/../../../ | head -n1))"
if test -x ./autogen.sh; then ./autogen.sh "$@"; else ./configure "$@"; fi && make && sudo make install || echo "Build Failed"

Unless the above commands printed out a "Build Failed" message, the driver was successfully installed. You can continue to the post-install steps below. Otherwise, please contact the linuxwacom developers for support.

Building with meson

Supported since xf86-input-wacom 0.41.0

meson setup builddir/ -Dprefix=/usr
cd builddir/
meson compile
sudo meson install

Unless the above commands failed, the driver was successfully installed. You can continue to the post-install steps below. Otherwise, please contact the linuxwacom developers for support.

Post-Install

In order to begin using the driver, you will need to log out so that the Xorg server can restart. In addition, it may be necessary to configure X before you can use your tablet; see the configuring X page for more information.