I’d like to set up my Wacom (Intuos S) device such that in a press of a button, I can cycle between 2 of my monitors. I have previously had this functionality with my Windows machine.
I found the option “Switch monitor” as a button functionality under the Wacom Tablet settings:
Though it will only ever switch and be fixed to one monitor, then display a little popup box with my tablet model name at the bottom.
Is this a feature or a bug? How can I fix this, or how can I achieve this?
I would start out by saying that you will need to do some digging as for the driver being used and it’s functionality.
Comparing Windows here is no help, because the driver is not a 1 to 1 conversion so if it works on Windows it is not a guarantee it will work on Linux if there is no support for this.
I own a HUION tablet and it is not fully supported although the driver is provided by the vendor.
Are you using one of the open driver solutions or did you just plug it in and see if it worked?
I have indeed done much digging before posting this question -
The tablet sort of worked straight out of the box, though the settings menu and GIMP did not recognize my stylus. That was fixed by installing the libwacom-utils.x86_64 package, which was not present before. I have also installed 2 more packages that seemed necessary for my needs.
A quick run of dnf list '*wacom*':
Nevertheless, I don’t think if it’s a driver issue per-se; The functionality is technically there from, for instance, using the commandline tool xsetwacom:
Notice how MapToOutput, quite literally, has a “next” operator.
xsetwacom --set <id> MapToOutput next works fluently as I wished:
Firing the above command triggers a switch from monitor 1, to monitor 2, to all displays - and repeats on execution. That’s the exact behavior the “Switch monitor” setting should, in theory, have.
(The option for
Areaset also exists, but I can’t attach any more screenshots as a ‘new user’.)
It’s also important to mention that the functionality of the “Map to Monitor” setting menu works 100% fine; all Fedora really really needs to do in practice is to decide “which monitor is next in the cycle?”, and just set this setting accordingly. (Or use the “next” operator of the command previously shown.)
This is why I doubt it’s a driver-related issue.
I’m certain the “Switch monitor” feature is supposed to work as I described, but for some reason - it just does not. All the necessary tools are there in place - but this feature just doesn’t work.
Maybe I can somehow see a log output or event viewer of this? Perhaps there is an underlying error that should be fixed…?
I could alternatively just make a script to listen to the button press I want and fire this command, but if the feature is there and exists, then… yk.
You can try a couple of things :
dmesg -w makes dmesg wait for new messages and display them as they come in.sudo journalctl -k -f can also be used to follow kernel messages in real-time. The -k option filters for kernel messages, and the -f option follows the log.I ended up doing a workaround to achieve this behavior.
I assigned a random, absurd keyboard shortcut I’ll never use to the command previously discussed, xsetwacom --set <id> MapToOutput next:
Then attached it as a keystroke for my desired button:
Which works perfectly fine.
For any future visitors, the way you get the device ID is simply by running xsetwacom --list devices, and determining which one is your stylus:
I didn’t end up debugging the feature as earlier discussed, becuase I didn’t really know if it was worth the effort just for this silly inconvenience; and if I would even get any meaningful results from it. I’m still quite certain, though, that it’s an issue on Fedora’s (or gnome’s?) part, that should sometime be reviewed and fixed.
Nevertheless, thank you for your assistance!
Fedora ships Vanilla Gnome, so it would absolutely be Gnome’s bug to file and track.
