I’m currently using a Wacom Bamboo CTH-470 tablet on Fedora 40, with gnome, and I’m looking for a way to properly configure the touch functionality.
Out of the box, Fedora supports the tablet natively—pen input just works without needing additional config. However, I can’t find any way to enable/disable touch, configure the tablet buttons or to change between mouse or artist mode.
When I tried using xsetwacom --list, it returned no devices, so I switched to OpenTabletDriver, which has been better for configuring the pen behavior and the buttons (I was able to stop it from always behaving like it’s in “artist mode”).
Unfortunately, OpenTabletDriver doesn’t seem to have a plugin that enables the touch mode propertly on linux and I haven’t been able to find a workaround so far.
Has anyone managed to get touch working properly on Fedora with this kind of tablets? Any advice or tools you’d recommend?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions—thanks in advance!
The relevant hardware is clear (Wacom Bamboo CTH-470), but it would be important to know which Gnome session (X11 or Wayland) and how OP installed the extra drivers (open tablet driver). The “x” in “xsetwacom” indicates that it works in X11 only.
So, I fired up Gnome (my daily DE is sway). More specifically: Gnome Wayland on Fedora 42 Workstation.
I have a Wacom Bamboo CTH-670, and as far as I can tell, everything works as expected. The Bamboo can be configured in Gnome’s settings. The settings are somewhat limited: for example, the “tap” setting in “mouse/touchpad” applies to both the laptop touchpad and the Bamboo. The tablet settings allow you to assign buttons, map tablet area to screen(s) and change pressure in a few steps.
As for turning pressure off (what some call “artist mode off”): I"m used to turning this on or off in applications, even per drawing tool such as in Gimp, but not globally.
It’s true that you don’t have “full control” in those settings. But it’s possible in Wayland. E.g., I use swaymsg input "$fdevice" events disabled to turn off the “finger device” (Bamboo touch) completely, or swaymsg input "$fdevice" tap disable to turn off Bamboo’s tap. I don’t know which tool exposes those settings in Gnome.
BTW: For mapping buttons, input-remapper works well for me, it’s packaged in Fedora. I use it with the Bamboo and an XPen.
Thanks for the heads-up! I’ve actually been postponing the upgrade to Fedora 41 or 42 because I ran into several issues trying to get Fedora 40 working properly. After doing a fresh install of Fedora 40 and updating everything, every time I logged in and opened an app, it would crash and send me back to the login screen. The only way I could use the system normally was by selecting a session with “Xorg.”
Eventually, I discovered that the root cause was my AMD/ATI graphics card. Switching from the radeon to the amdgpu driver completely stopped the crashes. I’ve seen a lot of people lately reporting similar issues — especially with older AMD cards — some of them related to Mesa. I found the solution through steps outlined in this Bugzilla link: Bugzilla Red Hat - Bug 2292321.
That’s actually one of the reasons I’ve been hesitant to update again: I didn’t want to risk breaking things when I had finally achieved a stable setup. I just hadn’t had the time to troubleshoot potential issues again. But now that I want to start using my tablet, I’ll go ahead with the update and see how it goes.
I’m currently using GNOME on X11 — I haven’t switched to Wayland yet precisely because I wanted to avoid compatibility issues until the “mesa” incompatibilities are fixed
As for the driver, I installed OpenTabletDriver from the GitHub releases directly — not through Flatpak or any package manager. To get OpenTabletDriver working, I also had to blacklist Fedora’s built-in Wacom drivers, because they were interfering and claiming the device before OTD could do anything. After that, it started working much more reliably.
Regarding “artist mode” — sorry if that term was confusing. What I meant is the mode where the pen maps 1:1 to the screen, so wherever I place the pen on the tablet, the cursor jumps directly to that position. I’m not entirely sure what the official term is — maybe “drawing mode”? In any case, I’m trying to switch it to behave like a mouse, so that the pen just moves the cursor relative to its previous position, without needing to travel across the whole tablet to reach corners. This is my first time using a drawing tablet, so I’m still learning the correct terminology.
By the way, I’m guessing that when I upgrade to Fedora 42, the Wacom driver blacklist might get undone — is that something I should expect? Just wondering if I’ll need to redo that step after the upgrade.
Thanks for sharing that! I actually plan to upgrade to Fedora 42 Workstation first thing, to start as close as possible to a “fresh install” and reduce the risk of weird leftover bugs. Hopefully that’ll give me a clean baseline to work from. Quick question though: is there any graphical interface where I could configure this stuff, or is it all terminal-based by design? I don’t mind using the terminal — I just want to make sure I’m not missing a GUI tool that might make it easier to tweak things.
If the terminal is the way to go, is there a way to list the available commands or options for configuring each part? Like for instance, is it possible to change the gestures that the tablet recognizes in touch mode? I’d be very interested in customizing that if it’s possible.
With Xorg I forced evdev on my CTH-470 but that seemingly doesn’t work with Touch/finger input (I only use the stylus for a game).
Iirc a Pad, Touch, and Stylus input are presented. The wacom Xorg DDX input driver has different Touch settings for config, and I had Absolute touch working with a xorg.conf snippet:
Is awesome to see someone else using a CTH-470 on Fedora!
I’ve mainly been using OpenTabletDriver, and so far it’s worked well for what I need — just using the stylus like a mouse. But I’ve had to blacklist the built-in Wacom drivers on Fedora to prevent conflicts. I just updated to Fedora 41 and I realized that there wasn’t major changes on the drivers, and overall in my configurations, that’s great in part.
Don’t you think that would be really nice to have touch gestures working? like swiping to switch desktops or scrolling with the hand — using only the stylus all the time can get a bit uncomfortable.
From your message, I understand that you had absolute touch working on Xorg using the wacom DDX driver — that’s the default configuration for the pen on most systems, right? At least that’s how it appears to me the first time when I connected the Wacom to Fedora. Personally, I find it a bit uncomfortable to use it that way because I’m trying to use the pen more like a mouse. Having to move across the whole tablet just to reach different parts of the screen feels a bit awkward for me.
Do you know if is there any way to make Touch mode work, even in a limited fashion? Or is it completely unsupported for our model? If you still have your CTH-470 plugged in, would you mind checking whether touch input is recognized at all ? I’d really appreciate it. That would help me a lot in deciding whether I can eventually drop OpenTabletDriver and try setting things up the same way you did using the system drivers. Thanks a lot in advance!
Touch on CTH-470 looks fine out-the-box F42 Workstation GNOME 48 both Wayland and Xorg! I plugged it in with USB, opened Firefox, and finger gestures for 2-finger scroll and pinch-to-zoom worked. Touch/finger input defaults to Relative (like a traditional laptop touchpad; not Absolute like stylus)
X11 shows this out-the-box F42 (no xorg.conf snippet):
[ 94040.187] (II) Using input driver 'wacom' for 'Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pad'
[ 94040.238] (II) Using input driver 'wacom' for 'Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen'
[ 94040.291] (II) Using input driver 'wacom' for 'Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen eraser'
[ 94040.291] (II) Using input driver 'libinput' for 'Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Finger'
That’s awesome to read! It’s honestly great to find someone using the same tablet on Fedora — I’ve been searching a lot these past few days about how to get the setup right, and it’s been pretty tricky. For someone inexperienced like me, OpenTabletDriver was the most straightforward option I could find.
So if you don’t mind, I’d really appreciate it if you could explain how you set up the tablet Especially if you could share how to configure the driver through the terminal — I’d love to learn how to switch between “tablet mode” and “mouse mode,” and maybe even tweak a gesture or two.
It’s strange, though — when I first plugged mine in, touch didn’t work at all. I even tried changing settings like enabling left-handed mode, but the pointer direction didn’t flip. It felt like the graphical settings menu was a bit broken or unresponsive, and I couldn’t figure out what command to use in the terminal to configure it from there either.
By the way, random question — is the game you use the tablet for Osu!? While I was researching, I came across a bunch of forum posts about the game that mentioned OpenTabletDriver. It sounded like such a cool idea for a cross-platform driver — it’s just a shame that on Linux the touch gesture plugins don’t seem to work well, or at least they don’t enable touch input properly for our model.
That definitely looks different on my end. Here’s a screenshot of the same menu. Could it be because I’m on Fedora 41? Or maybe it’s the theme I’m using? Strange though.
It could be different F41 and F42, but I also installed xorg-x11-drivers (I’m thinking it’s providing the wacom driver under Xorg but I’m not sure how it would affect Wayland)
On Linux the stylus worked fine and I didn’t really need to do anything, but I think there was something where lifting the stylus high-enough to disconnect from the tablet while your palm on the touch surface just long enough could cause the finger/stylus mode to switch briefly and then cause the stylus to retake focus (cursor jump in-game). OpenTabletDriver on Windows only presents stylus (touch non-functional) so I think disabling Touch on Linux would be ideal for that.
I figured out some xorg.conf stuff mainly on FreeBSD:
That’s super helpful, thank you!
If you don’t mind me asking, what exact command did you use to install the xorg-x11-drivers package?
Also, how can I make sure which driver my Wacom tablet is actually using? And how can I change the default driver to xorg-x11-drivers?
Sorry for the noob questions I haven’t been using Fedora for too long and I’m still a bit nervous tweaking system stuff on my own. Your help really means a lot!
Hahaha makes sense I wish it had worked that smoothly for me the first time! Maybe something just bugged out on my end.
That’s really interesting about the touch/stylus switching issue — I hadn’t thought about how that could affect gameplay. Disabling touch on Linux sounds like a good idea then, at least while using the pen.
Especially if you could share how to configure the driver through the terminal — I’d love to learn how to switch between “tablet mode” and “mouse mode,” and maybe even tweak a gesture or two.
While I was researching, I came across a bunch of forum posts about the game that mentioned OpenTabletDriver. It sounded like such a cool idea for a cross-platform driver — it’s just a shame that on Linux the touch gesture plugins don’t seem to work well, or at least they don’t enable touch input properly for our model.
I didn’t do too much testing under F41 though.